Rules and Guidelines: word order with "u"

Karo Glosa-pe,

I have been reading the Glosa Internet Dictionary much late= ly, and have a program that can parse ‘glen.txt’. A huge thank you to Marc= el and the other contributors for their work! When my program (written in = Python) is sufficiently developed, I can make it available, if desired. My= initial goal is to produce an HTML version that has bold main entries. I = plan to rerun it as new releases appear from Marcel.

The next question I h= ave for you all concerns the grammar rules of Glosa. I know that Wendy Ash= by and Ron Clark rarely stated them. Learning from examples, as presented = in “18 Steps”, is an excellent way to learn. But afterwards when I have a = question about usage, it is painful to scan through lots of text to discove= r if usage X is ever done. So I would like to try to deduce what rules of = the grammar there seem to be, as well as what are simply guidelines, and pr= esent them to you all for review and correction. Loosely, a ‘rule’ is alw= ays followed, and a ‘guideline’ is usually followed, and may have to do = with good style (however that is defined) more so than correctness. (I hop= e not to get into prescriptionist vs descriptionist discussions. :)

For ex= ample, a rule would be: “u” always precedes the noun it modifies, possibl= y with intervening modifiers.

So, to begin: is this a rule?

1. When = ‘u’ is used with a noun that also has one or more adjectives, “u” always pr= ecedes the adjectives. This applies equally to “un” and “plu”.

   C= orrect: un hedo prince u mega kali religio-do Incorrect: = hedo un prince mega u kali religio-do

I scanned “18 Steps” and did = not find any counterexamples, but I could have missed one, and even absence= there is not a proof. Please send your thoughts, corrections, discussion.= For now I am trying to stay strictly with the documents produced by W.A. = and R.C from 1985 onwards, i.e., the official defining docs of the language= . I know outside of that there seems to be a lot of variation…

Saluta = e Gratia! Kim