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I'll tell how I have the articles organized in Minyeva, maybe it might be helpful. I have five articles: te, da, ki, sao, and cai. - te: the X previously mentioned. The word has to be introduced by one of the other three articles (da, ki, sao). [TA, TB] - da: a particular X that I have in mind. [AA, AC] - ki: a generic instance of X. [TJ, TK, AB, NA, NB] - sao: the one and only X, the X defined by Y. [TC, TD, TE, TI] - cai: the one with the name X. [TG, NC] not covered by these: TF, TH In the sentence "I'm going to marry a swede", using da vs. ki for "a" gives different meanings. The sentence "I'm going to marry da swede" means "There is a particular swede I'm going to marry", while "I'm going to marry ki swede" means "I'm going to find some swede someday and marry that person". The meaning of "ki" is translated very idiomatically in English: sometimes with "the", other times with "a", and other times with nothing at all. For example: "Today we are going to study the tiger." "You could get eaten by a tiger." "Tigers are very dangerous." So far, from your discussion of articles in ceqli so far, it looks like your articles match up like this: to = te tuya = ki (null)/# = da ?? = sao ti = cai I've done some preliminary frequency studies on my adjectives by looking at texts from novels and counting up how many words in the texts would match up to each article. Here is the count I came up with, sampling from Lord of the Rings, Dune, and The Outsiders: sao: 71 ki: 31 da: 23 te: 18 The distribution is mostly reducable (meaning, in smaller samples it usually has about the same ratios). -- Garrett Jones http://www.alkaline.org >