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--- And Rosta <a.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
---------------------------------
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...
I recently attended a conference on Language
Creation (see conlangs.berkeley.edu for most of
the details). In the chat there among mainly
California conlangers it was apparent that the
interests lay in artlangs -- languages for other
worlds, as it were -- and whatever you want to
call languages used to try out linguistics bits:
combining features or flaunting supposed
restrictions (experlangs?). Almost everyone had
at one time or another looked at Lojban and most
claimed either to have tried to learn it or to be
intending to do so. Beyond that, englangs,
insofar as I understand the term, was just not an
issue. I don't know whether this was because
they assumed that Lojban either had the role
sewed up or was going to spawn what did or
because it just was not a topic (or range of
topics) that interested them. I also don't know
how representative a California contingent
amounting to maybe twenty-five people is of the
whole conlanger universe (California is
notoriously unrepresentative generally, but also
has a reputation for being on the crest of the
wave of the furure).
> 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.
My memory of classes with Church is fading and my
encounter with LISP was brief, but both of them
feature images of endless streams of parentheses,
all of which had to be in place at pain of either
saying nothing at all or saying something quite
remote from what was intended (that was, I
recall, why my run with LISP was so brief --
debugging took forever just to get a formula
legit, never mind right). This was typically in
the atomic bits of formulae, even when the
molecules were built up Polishly.
> 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?
"Greenhouse" doesn't seem at all coordinate: it
is not a house and green but rather a house for
greens, closer to "lion hunter" than to "white
hunter" (which isn't really coordinate either,
since some part of "hunter" slops over to the
"white" side "a hunter who is white (as hunters
or at least people go)."
> "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.
I guess I don't quite see the difference here: is
it that the head of the phrase is mentioned in
the "literal" case and not in the "subordinate"
one? ("leafmold" is, by the way, a nice addition
to my list of paradigm cases of (frankly)
tanru/lujvo sources in Lojban.
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.
Nice. But is that really achievable: unambiguous
phrases the size of ambiguous words?
> 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"?
Both interesting ideas.