Noun Phrase Markers?

Karo glosa-pe,

I’ve been trying to learn glosa on my own for a bit, and am= enjoying it immensely. I like its isolating, pidgin-like quality.

Now, h= ighly isolating languages are able to keep their “simple” form by using a l= ot of helper-words as markers. Glosa does this rather well for verb phrase= s, but it has a very weak system of marking noun-phrases, as in the classic= example:

plu tri celero fo-sono rubi vagona ‘three fast loud red cars’

W= hich one is the substantive? You can figure it out well enough, but it tak= es more cognitive processing time than is desirable.

My proposal is to u= se the clitics -ci and -la (as in u-ci ‘this’ and u-la ‘that’) as noun mark= ers in cases where ambiguity might result, as above. Thus:

plu tri celero= fo-sono rubi vagona-ci ‘these three fast loud red cars here’

This princip= le, if deemed acceptable, would have a couple of cool implications. For ex= ample, -ci and -la could be used to construct a contrast between two simila= r items:

eqo-ci es maxi boni, eqo-la es homo porko. ‘this horse here is gr= eat, that horse there is like a pig’.

Another extension of the principle m= ight be the use of -co to mark the resumption of the main clause after a lo= ng relative clause. In written glosa, punctuation can express clause-bound= aries, but this might not be true in spoken.

Thus we might say in colloqui= al spoken English:

“That bad man who hit me yesterday, he apologized today= .”

In Glosa, with my clitics proposal, we would say:

U kako andro-la; qui= bate mi pa-di; u-co dice penite nu-di.