Prepare yourself for some grammatical ramblings:

Lost is a rather peculiar word in the dragon language. The guide lists its definition as "Have/Was". So far we have been using it as all forms of the verb "to have" (have, has, had) and the past tense of "to be" (was, were).

Another peculiar word is loost, listed to mean "hath." "Hath" is an archaic form of "has." Why would the dragon language have a word that means an archaic form of an English word? Perhaps it's meant to invoke the sense of archaic speech. Either way, "has" and "hath" are both third-person conjugations for "to have," which has some major implications about how lost should (or shouldn't) be used.

The reason I started thinking about this is because I got curious and couldn't find any canon examples where lost is used to mean "has." By comparison loost only appears in a single Word Wall where it's used to make a clear reference to the phrase "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

My question is, are we wrong to assume that lost can be used to mean both "have" and "has"? If so, then we have a case of actual conjugation on our hands:

Zu'u lost
Hi lost
Rok loost
Rek loost
Nii loost
Nust lost
Mu lost

Now the advantage to this is that you will never confuse "She has eaten" with "She was eaten." Currently both of these would be written as "Rek lost naako." Here it would be "Rek loost nako" ("she has/hath eaten") and "Rek lost naako" ("she was eaten").

Unfortunately, canon introduces another complication for us. There is yet another word that is used to mean "was/were", and that is los. Los is typically used as the present tense of "to be" (is / am / are). This actually makes sense to see it used as "was/were" because most verbs in the dragon language are used for both past and present tense. This is seen on a number of the Word Walls (search for "was" and you'll see the examples).

So now we're left with two ways to express "has" (one possibly incorrect) and two ways to express "was." What to do? Here are my personal recommendations:

• In cases where past tense will always be used, such as telling a story:
  • use los to mean all forms of "to be" besides kos
  • use lost to mean all forms of "to have" and never for past tense of "to be"
• In cases where tense is going to be changing, such as conversation:
  • use los to mean the present tense of "to be" (is/am/are)
  • use lost to mean the past tense of "to be" (was/were)
  • use lost to mean "have" and "had"
  • use loost to mean "has"
• Use the verb suffix -aan wherever possible so you can get rid of "to have":
  • Zu'u lost koraav ("I have seen")
  • Zu'u koravaan ("I have seen"), now it won't be confused for "I was seen"

This is largely going to rely on context so think of it more of a guideline than any hard grammar rule. The thing about loost is that it will always mean "has" and can't be confused for "was/were," so consider using it more often in your writing and speech.