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on 2/15/04 5:32 PM, oskar2379 at xeubie@hidden.email wrote: > I've been playing around with different loglangs and after looking > through ceqli, I am interested in how it resolves ambiguity. I am > specifically talking about figuring out what is the predicate and > what are the arguments. > > One example is: > > Pe xau kom pan sa kane. > Person sees the bread-eating dog. Okay, first to put it into contemporary ceqli: Jin xaw kom pan de xyen. This can be ambiguous, of course, as you said. I see ceqli as a language that can disambiguate when required. The sentence as it stands is probably perfectly clear. However, you can make it unambiguous thus: To jin sa xaw to kom te pan de xyen. 'Sa' acts like French ça, sort of. It groups preceding noun phrases together as, in this case, the subject of the sentence. So we know that what follows is the verb. After the verb, another noun phrase is signaled by the 'te'. The modifying phrase, 'kom pan' is terminated by the 'de' and we know that what follows is modified by the de-phrase. So, unlike Loglan, ceqli doesn't require the disambiguation, but it's available if you need it. > > How does one know not to separate it as: > > [Pe] xau kom [pan sa kane] > Person see-eats the bread-type-of-dog. > > or > > [Pe xau] kom [pan sa kane] > Person-goer eats bread-type-of-dog. > > In both cases, the verb is confused as part of a compound. > > I'm also curious as to what you consider the advantage of putting > adjectives and adverbs and suchlike _before_ whatever they are > describing. I realize that run-on sentences are non-existent in > chinese, due to the fact that descriptions can only run on for so > long before you must reveal what you are describing. I can't > decide whether or not this is a good thing, so I'll leave it for you > all to help me with. In ceqli you can do either, really. To bon de xyen ca joy de dorm sta to dom. The good dog happily sleeps in the house. 'Hu' acts as 'de', except it marks that what follows modifies what goes before, the opposite f 'de.' To xyen hu bon ca dorm hu joy sta to dom. Admittedly, I don't have a good way to separate the dorm and sta in the first sentence and the joy and sta in the second... Krawn? Maybe it should be: To bon de xyen ca joy de dorm hu sta to dom. indicating that 'sta to dom' is a modifier of dorm. and To xyen hu bon ca dorm hu joy, hu sta to dom. The comma showing that it's co-equal with joy as a modifier of dorm. (Actually, one reason we have 'hu' and 'de' alternatives is to avoid this kind of ambiguity.) When commas are used, they can be read as a pause, or actually pronounced as 'koma.' Rex F. May (Baloo) Daily cartoon at: http://www.cnsnews.com/cartoon/baloo.asp Buy my book at: http://www.kiva.net/~jonabook/book-GesundheitDummy.htm