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Mart�n Bald�n, On 07/05/2006 21:01:
I'm working on a logical language myself, but it's still less than half-baked, and quickly evolving. To be brief, I'd like it to have a lisp-like syntax, and I think I've thought of a minimally verbose way to express deeply nested parenthesis, by using three parenthethical symbols (words) instead of two, with a bottom-up hierarchical markup. I think that this avoids ever having to write/say two consecutive parenthetical symbols, and also lets you pick a parenthesised expression and build another one from it, without altering its inner hierarchical markup. I can elaborate if someone is interested.
Now that I've seen it, my thoughts are as follows: The syntax as described brackets words together into groups. But if you examine the structure of a logical representation, it consists of predicate--argument relations. So what one asks from a loglang syntax is not that it group words together but that it represent predicate--argument relations.
Notice that, when we build complex expressions from simpler ones, the inner markup of the constituent expressions is preserved, and only the outest parenthesis of each one of them is changed. This is a form of encapsulation, which is one of my top priority design criteria.
What does 'encapsulation' mean, in this context?
2) I want my language to be "pause-free", that is, I want speakers to be able to speak without making pauses or glottal stops, and still emmit a uniquely parseable stream of sounds.
Why do glottal stops count as pauses? Lots of languages have glottal stop phonemes. In no language that I know do glottal stops count as pauses (e.g. by correlating with the incidence of intonation phrase boundaries). AFAIK, the "glottal stop = pause" equation has its origins in the very accidental history of Lojban. --And.