Since message 9 didn't exactly provide a wealth of new information to speculate upon (which I think to be the reason for this nonexisting debate), I reviewed some older stuff and came up with a new idea for "-": Somebody mentioned much earlier, that we'll run out of new symbols at some point, and that there'd have to be a mechanism to expand the character set in some way. Now what if the Cetians have been clever enough to anticipate this dilemma - but instead of just starting over at "0" (with some additional qualifier), they started expanding the list of symbols "sideways". What I mean is, that they use "-" to indicate that there's something new here (e.g. "-3-" is a new thing for which we have no new symbol, thus we just recycled the "3" and put a pair of "-" around it). They may do this, to indicate something like relation between concepts, without really knitting close ties between "3" and "-3-". Thus "-2-" could be read as "that word, which was derived from "2" " and thus "-2-" could be practically anything, that is related to the concept of "home", "birthplace", "shelter" etc. In this sense, "2 -2- 0 -2- 2" could be anything from "cetians live on homeworld" to "Cetians watch infomercials on homeworld" or even "cetians have families on homeworld" ("cetians hate homeworld"??). Just some ideas here ...