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Re: [engelang] Re: Self-segmenting words & the treatment of names

Mart�n Bald�n, On 09/05/2006 02:29:

Hi!
--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:

[I haven't had anything but spam off this list for years!]


That's surprising, given the catchy name of this group. Where do all
the people interested in engelangs meet? :)


Apparently, the number of people with sustained interest in engelangs can be counted on one or two hands...


BTW, I've read you are the originator of the "engineered language"
term. If, so, congrats (and also to John Cowan for the shorter
"engelang"): I've found it very useful to describe my field of
interest, as opposed to "artistic languages" or the more general
"constructed languages", while "logical languages" was too restrictive.


I'm gratified to be so congratulated...


I'm no expert, but I'd say Lisp is basically a programming language
based on lambda-calculus with polish notation.


If polish notation, then why does the syntax involve all these brackets? Polish notation, of course, is bracket-free.


I agree. IIRC, my conlang has a couple of ways of exiting foreign

text (that are specified when entering it). The requirement is of

course that the exit marker does not occur within the text itself. In

one method, the exit marker contains a click phoneme. In the other

method, a la Lojban, the exit marker is defined at the point of entry.


It seems that the most similar quotation style in lojban is "zoi X
.text. X", as described in:
http://www.lojban.org/sv/publications/reference_grammar/chapter19.html
Yes. 
An advantage of my method is that it doesn't require the leading and
trailing pauses.


Better to think of Lojban /./ as a glottal stop. It is normal for languages to phonologize glottal stops, but unheard of for them to phonologize pauses.

IIRC, in the equivalent Livagian, the functional equivalent of /./ in "zoi xxxx ." is also the functional equivalent of your sei/lia etc. That is the structure is:

foreign-text-introducer + delimiter + delimiter-end-marker + foreign-text + delimiter

All this stuff is in the language for the sake of completeness rather than because of any likelihood that it would see much usage...


Like Jorge, I feel that this proposal does not score high with

respect to the Concision desideratum... Your solution is pretty
analogous to one of those my conlang uses for foreign text, but it
strikes me as too cumbersome for ordinary names.

I guess the solution will depend both on the phonology of your

conlang and on its segmentation strategy.

I agree, and that's why I've considered to let the speaker set a
persistent keyword. I prefer not to distort names for the sake of
conciseness. My design principles, in this respect are:

1) First provide strong encapsulation, then try to make it concise.
2) I have no idea of which phonemes will be unlikely in the foreign
names the speaker will use.

One strategie for conciseness is to let the speaker assign nicknames,
so that foreign names only have to be pronounced once.


It's this nicknaming stage that I'm interested in. That is, Lojban has the la'o stage, where names are given in their original unaltered form. But this is very clunky, and names are normally in cmevla form, i.e. normalized to the conventions of Lojban cmevla, which requires that they end in /C./. So in my remarks that you quoted in beginning this thread, I was thinking about how best to adapt foreign names to the name-conventions of the conlang. On the whole, I think the nativized form of the foreign name should be no longer than the original and should have its shape as little distorted as possible.


As for the kinds of composition, "coordinate" means that the relation
is simmetrical (for instance, an AND or an OR relation, as in the
English words "greenhouse", "houseboat",..), 

Are there examples where the relation is OR?


"subordinate" mean that
the relation is asimmetrical (as in the English words "skyscraper",
"treekiller", "mousetrap",..). "Literal" means that the string of
constituent words should be read as if they were independent words in
a phrase, and then search for a metaphoric meaning of the whole phrase
(as in the English words "wannabe" "look-alike").


This is nice. But couldn't "skyscraper", "treekiller", "mousetrap" be literals? I.e. "scrapes sky", "kills trees", "traps mice"? A clearer example of a subordinate might be "leafmold", say, = "mold that grows on leaves". I look forward to hearing more, anyway.

For Livagian I have no productive methods of stem-formation. If you want something whose meaning is unambiguously determinable from its parts, then you use a syntactic phrase, not a single words. If it is sufficient for the meaning to be vaguely determinable from its parts, then you don't need productive rules of stem formation. For many engelangers the rationale for having productive derivation is that words are shorter than phrases. But to me that just shows that in that engelang, phrases are too long, and the language needs to be conciser.


By the way, one important concept in my language is that supra-word
lexemes should be marked, and they can be compound, just as words. It
means that multi-word terms such as "black ice" or phrases like "kick
the bucket", whose meaning is not equal to the meaning of their
constituents, should be marked by keywords as independent lexemes.
Do these multi-word idioms have to form a contiguous sequence? Or do you allow things like "Tabs were kept on me", using the idiom "keep tabs on" = "monitor"? 
--And.