The Continuous

In English, to talk about something happening continuously, we use the ending -ing. He is singing. She is dancing. I am having lunch. In Gudjal, the -li verb ending does something similar.

You might have noticed it can combine with the -ya present ending. When it does, you put -li before -ya. So adding -li-ya onto the end of a verb means that something is occuring right now in this exact moment.

Although we don't have any examples in Gudjal, it was probably also possible for -li to attach to the past tense -na. (We know this because it's possible in Gugu-Badhun, which is very, very similar to Gudjal.) In this case, adding -li-na to the end of a verb would have meant something like "was X-ing" as in "he was eating" and "she was hunting".