[leke]

I think it's to distinguish between adjectives. Perhaps telo pona means good water so "telo pona li lete" is clear that "good water is cold". I don't know I'm totally guessing here :D

Anyway, if you like these simple kind of languages, checkout http://angoslanguage.wikispaces.com/

[schoen]

Your interpretation is right. There's an example somewhere in one of the official tutorials that shows how moving the li can change the meaning for this reason (although "pi", which means something like "of", was also added for a similar reason: I think Sonja's example was distinguishing two ways of grouping "tomo telo nasa", where "(tomo telo) nasa" would mean "crazy bathroom" and "tomo (telo nasa)" would mean "bar, liquor store" -- so Sonja said the second case would be expressed by "tomo pi telo nasa").

[camdez]

Ah, that's a good point. I suppose the limited vocabulary swells the number of compounds, making for more opportunities for confusion in parsing them.

Thanks!