In this article we will briefly discuss the manner which we have constructed the glosses for Common. For the purposes of this body of work, we have developed particular conventions for convenience, as well as selected particular glossing abbreviations. This article explains the conventions chosen and lists the glossing abbreviations used. Some abbreviations chosen are specifically shortened from their more common standard forms, created out of nothing, or used in a nonstandard way in order to make Common glosses more concise and attuned to the language.

Common has is a highly fusional language in small set of the vocabulary in which it is common for one morpheme to encode several meanings at once. The remainder of the vocabulary tends to be isolating, with mostly distinct derivational affixes with single meanings.

Many words do not have fusional meanings of derivational affixes - a simple English gloss will be chosen for these close to the word's perceived 'centre of gravity' in terms of its meaning. Common words can have notoriously broad and slippery meanings, but we will try to choose fairly consistent glosses.

Some vocabulary items look like they have clear affixes that convey a part of the meaning, but in many cases this is an illusion and a product of design and there are a number of cases where things that look like affixes aren't. For that reason, we will to take words like 'wenaz', a first person plural nominative article and pronoun, and gloss it as a single morpheme instead of trying to parse out 'we' and 'naz', the latter of which looks like it's functioning as a nominative suffix.

To handle this, when glossing a word, meanings imparted to the word fusionally will be glossed with glossing abbreviations separated by periods, and glossing abbreviations of separable morphemic parts will be separated  by hyphens.

For articles, the order will be person-definiteness-case-number (though that article part may be dropped, since it is always present across the board for noun determiners). The fact that these also function as pronouns will be ignored and they will always be glossed the same way.

Examples:

naz pikki
3.DEF.NOM.PL cat

ijur sy
2.DAT.PA sir

Relative pronouns will be introduced with RELN or RELV instead of person, the former for 'su', applying to nouns, and the latter for 'si', applying to verbs.

For verbal auxiliaries, the order will be valence-tense-aspect-mood.

Examples:

te zeul
TRN.NPST.NPRF.REAL eye

'seeing'

nuxuty jusal
STRN.PST.PRF.IRREAL want

'would have wanted'

To contrast a gloss with separable morphemes, observe how the tight binding affix -no is glossed with a hyphen:

Example:

mikteno
approximate-TB

'approximately'

Short Glosses

As you can see, a single Common article/pronoun or auxiliary verb packs a lot of mandatory meaning in a small packages and glosses can become unwieldy. In order to make text more readable, short glosses may be applied in places by expressing part of the gloss of the particle with a shortcut. The remaining glossed information about the particle will be placed after it in a bracket, and only the parts of the meaning relevant to the meaning fo the passage may be included, other meanings which are technical present may be omitted. Such short forms are given for verbal auxiliaries as well, in this case taken from the gloss of their paradigm verb and standing for the AUX + transitivity part of their meaning.

In short glosses, certain meanings are considered default and an explicit gloss is only given if it violates the expectation.

The same examples using short glosses:

naz pikki
the(NOM.PL) cat

ijur sy
you(DAT.PA) sir

te zeul
hit(NP.IM) eye

'seeing'

nuxuty jusal
go(IR.P.PF) want

'would have wanted'