Glosa

According to History behind Glosa,[2] after Hogben's death “a few further and trivial changes were introduced”. But there is no precise information about them, so it's not clear exactly which changes were made by Hogben and Clark, and which were made by Clark and Ashby.

The first pronunciation is the preferred one:

There are no diphthongs in Glosa. Where two or more vowels occur together, they are pronounced separately.

The stress or accent should be placed gently on the vowel before the last consonant.[4]

Primitives are the small number of basic function words present in most languages—these allow us to describe the relationships between the major concepts we convey. These are basically prepositions and conjunctions, such as: de [of], e [and], pre [before], supra [above], sub [under; below; lower; beneath; lesser; somewhat].

Substantives here are the group of words that represents the more complex things, actions and descriptions (sometimes usable for all three) present in a language, such as: via [road], kurso [run], hedo [happy], vide [see], celera [swift], tako [fast; quick; swift; brisk; hasty; prompt; hurry; nimble; rapid; rapidity; rate; speed; haste; sprint; quick; speedy; velocity]; oku [eye]. Please note that many of these words have multiple meanings, based on how they are used in a sentence (verb, adjective, etc.), exempli gratia: "oku" can mean "eye", "optical", "to notice with the eyes", "see (look)", "perceive (with the eyes)", or "to peep".

Glosa, unlike English, distinguishes between "you" about one person, which is tu, and about several people, which is vi.[7]

The reflexive pronoun ”oneself” is se, the reciprocal pronoun alelo means ”each other”,[8] and the emphatic auto is used for “self, own“.

Most words can act as verbs, depending on their places in the sentence (usually in the medial position).

"Prior word" here means a word used immediately prior to the verb of the sentence or clause in order to demonstrate or affect its tense. For example:

• To show that a verb is in the past tense, add pa before the verb.
• To indicate the future tense, add fu before the verb.
• To indicate the conditional, add sio before the verb.

Adjectives, like the rest of the language, are not inflected. They do not change to fit the tense, number, gender, formality, or etc. of the nouns that they modify. They generally precede the word that they modify. Sometimes an adjective's place determines its meaning:

• Mi fu lekto mo bibli – I will read one book
• Mi fu lekto bibli mo – I will read the first book

To create "opposites", one just places "no-" as a prefix to the adjective. This usage is similar to that of the prefix "mal-" in Esperanto which gives the word the exact opposite meaning. So the Glosa usage below means "not beautiful". It is the equivalent of some of the uses on in- or un- in English.

• kali – beautiful
• no-kali – ugly
• termo – hot, heat
• meso-termo – warm
• no-termo – cold

Words used to ask or answer a question of who, where, what, when, why, how or how much. These words form a set in a semi-systematic manner with a particle of the compound indicating abstract quantity (what person or thing, what place, what time, for what reason, in what manner, what is the amount) and the prefix/other particle indicating the specific function of the word (exactly which, all, some, negating, etc.).

Here are some examples. There are other ways to say the following correlatives, the table just shows the most basic and systematic of these:

In addition to the above, there is the prefix/beginning singu- (each), and the suffixes/endings -numera (amount/number), -speci (quality/kind of) and -kron (time), which can be used in the same way as the above.

Qo horo? can also be used for “What time?” or “What is the time?”.

The basic demonstratives used for indication (this, that, etc.) are:

The demonstratives can also be used in the same way as the words in the table above: u-ci mode, u-la mode (thus; in this way, in that way), u-ci ka, u-la ka (for this cause, for that cause), u-ci te (with this intention), etc.

For “this time”, there's also nu (now), and for “that much/that many”, you can say tanto; for “that kind” talo.

To change a statement into an interrogative, qe is placed at the beginning of the sentence.

The prepositions of Glosa are here presented with their English translations, and with English example words containing cognates or the same roots in parentheses, with the corresponding part italicized.

The numbers from 0–10 are: ze, mo, bi, tri, tet, pen, six, seti, ok, nona, deka. For 0, 4, 5, 7 and 8 (ze, tet, pen, seti, ok), there's also the longer forms zero, tetra, penta, septi and okto. Higher numbers are formed by combining the numerals in the number, and in some cases by proper names:

Note that some use centi, the older form of hekto, for “hundred”. Centi is now used as “hundredth” in accordance with the ISO standard usage.

Numbers placed after a noun will function as ordinal numbers: u bibli tri, “the third book”. Mo, bi and tri also means single, double and triple, respectively.

In order to form a composite word in Glosa, one just combines existing words. For example:

• pe – person who does/person (short form of persona)
• an – male (from andros)
• fe – female (from femina)
• do – building where (from domo meaning house)
• lo – location, place of (from loko)

Therefore, a student is stude-pe (one who studies), a male student is stude-an, a female student is stude-fe and a building where students study (school, college, etc.) is a stude-do. Likewise a hospital is pato-do (from the word pathology but meaning sickness), literally meaning a house/building for the sick.

• tegu – cover; ceiling; (to) shutter; deck; lid (cover); eclipse; (to) shelter; casing
• oku-tegu – eyelid
• agri – field, countryside
• agri-lo – farm
• a-nu – until now

Meals can also be formed by noun-compounding:

• evening – vespera
• to eat, to devour – vora
• dinner, supper – vespera-vora

Generally, the following derivation rules apply when creating new words for Glosa.[10] Some basic words (often that act as specificational prefixes) are shortened (such as "an", "fe", or "pe").

Indefinite words remain as they are (ad, de, si, kata).

Latin words in the second declension become the nominative plural. Therefore:

• -us, -i ending are adapted to -i ending (rami, soni, tubi)
• -er, -ri become -ri (libri)
• -um, -i use the -a ending in Glosa (exempla)

Words built from the perfect-tense-radix become -i (cepti, fluxi, komposi). Latin -io, -ionis are not changed to the ablative-ending (-ione) but keep the nominatives -io (natio, okasio, petitio, religio, tensio).

The same occurs when deriving from Greek (however, Greek lacks an ablative so the dative is used instead):

• -os, -u become -o (fobo, orto).

Occasionally the Greek aorist-root is taken instead of present-tense-root (gene). Greek verbs become -o (1st person singular) such as: skizo. Species names keep nominative (equs, ursus).

Any time Greek CH, Y, RH, TH and PH occur they become K, I, R, T and F, respectively, in Glosa.

The following is taken from a text on language planning by Lancelot Hogben, author of Glosas precursor Interglossa. First a sample with Glosa and English side by side:

Glosa	English
U logika ge-face verba-lista sio apo multi sinonima alo proxi-sinonima, de qi Anglo-Amerika lingua es ple. Ex. little–small, big–large, begin–commence. Id ne nece tolera funktio imbrika homo band – ribbon – strip.	A rationally constructed word-list would discard many synonyms or near-synonyms, of which the Anglo-American language is full. For example, little–small, big–large, begin–commence. It need not tolerate functional overlap as with band – ribbon – strip.

And here continued as regular text, first in Glosa:

Plus, id sio evita excesi specializa per face mo verba akti qod in Plu Palaeo Lingua gene face per tri alo ma. Exempla, u France demo nima un extra tegu de homi soma la peau, u-la de cepa la pelure; e u-la de botuli la cotte.

And the English translation of the last paragraph:

Also, it would avoid over-specialization by making one word do what in natural languages is often done by three or more. For example, the French call the outer cover of the human body la peau, that of the onion la pelure, and that of the sausage la cotte.[11]

The following is the Lord's Prayer in Glosa, compared with Interglossa, Frater and English versions, respectively:

Notice that in Glosa the word ”sky” is derived from Greek (Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς, Ουρανός, God of the sky → Urani, sky) while Frater uses a Latin derived word (caelum, caeli).