I'm working on an IAL loosely based off of katlani
Squishing it down to use reasonable phonotactics, 11 letters, and slightly improved grammar is definitely going to render it kinda unsimilar to katlani though
Context serves to distinguish in most cases; if a distinction is both necessary and not provided by context, we can probably figure out a way to talk around it. Do you have a specific example in mind?
@DLosc the above for one, as well as "I was seeing something" or "I saw something" (in one, it was implied you just stopped seeing the thing, whereas before, the implication is you saw it a while back)
@RadvylfPrograms I was going to mention that /u/ would be a better choice than /o/, since it's more distinct from /a/ (and the three-vowel languages I've read about use a-i-u)
@StackMeterPlus But what's the context for the statement? For example, in "I have made dinner, let's eat" you would never say "I was making dinner, let's eat." So there's no need to distinguish the two cases because one of them would never come up.
I could see a need to distinguish between "I was making dinner when the dog barked" vs "I had made dinner when the dog barked," but the latter could be phrased as "After I made dinner, the dog barked."
I don't know if hada pat works for telling someone to do something (made a bit confusing here because you're telling someone to tell someone to do something), but it makes sense to me
hada ma su ka pat fara lia shuksor: "I'm telling you to go to school"?
Might technically be ambiguous with "I'm telling you that you are going to school" or maybe also "I'm telling you that I am going to school." Context might make that not a problem, tho.
"pas nork muratsh su o a pirish niny" = "the chicken attacked the cat and it (the cat) died" "pas nork muratsh su o a pirish pasny" = "the chicken attacked the cat and it (the chicken) died"
Since si can be used in the sense of "there is a" or "it exists" (si o is "there's a cat"), so no si seems like it could make sense there (e.g., no si o would mean "there's not a cat", so no si niny would mean something like "it doesn't exist")
I'm also not sure whether preposition + verb or preposition + full clause should be grammatical... I could be convinced, but if we're going to do that, let's make it officially part of the grammar.
