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--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
Brackets are used in Lisp (and also in knowledge representation
languages like SUO-KIF and CycL) in order to delimit terms. The syntax
of a sentence in these languages is, loosely speaking:
(predicate arg1 arg2 arg3 ...)
where "predicate", "arg1", "arg2" are called terms and they can, in
turn, be other parenthesised expressions. The actual nomenclature is
somewhat different. For instance, the following is BNF notation from
http://suo.ieee.org/SUO/KIF/suo-kif.html , point 4.4:
term ::= variable | word | string | funterm | number | sentence
relword ::= initialchar wordchar*
funword ::= initialchar wordchar*
funterm ::= (funword term+)
sentence ::= word | equation | relsent | logsent | quantsent
equation ::= (= term term)
relsent ::= (relword term+)
logsent ::= (not sentence) |
(and sentence+) |
(or sentence+) |
(=> sentence sentence) |
(<=> sentence sentence)
quantsent ::= (forall (variable+) sentence) |
(exists (variable+) sentence)
> > 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?
It means that, when you build bigger expressions from smaller ones,
you don't have to modify the smaller expressions internally. If you
make the hierarchical markup number be greater for inner parenthesis
than for outer ones (which I call the "top-down" approach), then you
are not providing encapsulation, because you have to change the
internal form of an expression so as to use it as a building block for
another expression. This doesn't mean that you loose any information,
it only means that you can't use it litterally.
On the other hand, in the "bottom up" approach, which I'm using, the
markup of the constituent expressions is unchanged (except their
outest parenthesis, but you can consider that they are not part of the
expression), and it's the bigger expression which has to adjust its
markup accordingly.
The drawback is, arguably, that you have to know the hierarchical
level of every term before you can use them to build a sentence. To
this, I can say that you only have to do that if you want to fuse
contiguous parenthesis, but you can ignore this at the expense of not
fusing them.
For instance "John gave the gift to Mary":
constituents: john, Mary, (1] the gift )1]
Usual form:
(2] give John Mary (1] the gift )2]
Alternative form:
(1] give John Mary (1] the gift )1] )1]
The alternative form is more verbous, but not so verbous as having to
repeat the sentence just because you forgot that one of the
constituents was already a level-1 expression.
>
> > 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.
>
Granted, they are not the same, and I would indeed acknowledge a
language as pause-free if it had glottal stops but no mandatory
pauses, so my phrasing was indeed incorrect. The reason I decided not
to include them in my design is that I find it difficult and tiresome
to speak a language with meaningful glottal stops. This may be because
in Spanish, my L1, glottal stops are mainly used to aid in parsing
where confusion is likely , for instance, to distinguish "la amiga"
from "la miga", and only when clarification seems to be needed. I
suspected that other speakers of languages without glottal stop
phonemes would have a similar feeling and could be tempted to smooth
glottal stops and eventually make them disappear. Besides, it seems to
me that glottal stops are best used between vowels, and difficult to
combine with consonants, so I didn't perceive removing them as a big
loss for my lexicon size.
Regards,
Martin Baldan