This website is about making good morphological glosses. However, there are situations in which a perfect gloss following the rules here proposed is not possible or appropriate, for instance because

• the author has insufficient linguistic knowledge of L1
• the intended readership does not appreciate a linguistically sophisticated interlinear gloss.

In such a situation, the degree of precision in an interlinear gloss may be reduced stepwise:

1. The exact function of certain morphs is not known. In this case, coin a grammatical category label consisting of the morphological category in question and a number, e.g. Particle1. S. the section on class and member.
2. The number and order of morphs in an L1 form is known, but the details of the morphological structure, in particular the position of the boundaries, are not. Then indicate the set of morphs in the gloss line, separating them by the colon.
3. Proper morphological glossing is not intended at all. Then it may seem sufficient to provide an L1 text line T with a word-by-word translation. Whenever one word of the translation matches one word of T, no additional problem arises. This, however, is not always the case. Consider the properly glossed .

A word-by-word translation of this form in a running text would not differ from the free translation of . Such a rendering, however, would violate even the basic requirement of glossing, viz. the correspondence of word boundaries. If not even this is guaranteed, then the entire word-by-word translation line is superfluous. Consequently, a special boundary symbol is needed here, illustrated by '.

Rule 26. An L1 word form whose morphological structure is not represented in the gloss line may be represented by a sequence of symbols (commonly, words) whose status as representing morphs or features is ignored and whose order has no implications as to L1. Such symbols that jointly correspond to an L1 word form are joined by an underscore (_).

In the converse case (a sequence of words in T corresponding to one word in the gloss), Rule 12 applies.

The important point here is not to use any of the reserved boundary symbols in the gloss, in particular not the blank, hyphen or the period, since this would mislead readers who do not know that these symbols are being used without their conventional function.