[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >

[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

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

Mart�n Bald�n, On 15/05/2006 02:28:

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

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.

Quote from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation :

"While the examples above use parentheses, one of the benefits of
Polish notation is that, assuming the arity of each operator is known,
parentheses are unnecessary: the order of operations is unique and
easy to determine, provided that the expression is well-formed."


That is, only if you assume that operators have a fixed arity (number
of arguments), which is rather inconvenient, especially for operators
such as AND, OR, and many others. SUO-KIF has variable arity in all
the operators, since it lets you ommit as many arguments as you like.
CycL, IIRC, has two kinds of operators: fixed-arity and
variable-arity. The latter is reserved for AND, OR and the like.


As I said in one of my messages yesterday, fixed arity means no brackets, and variable arity needs just an unlabelled right bracket. And in reverse polish, you need just an unlabelled left bracket.


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.

I think this is hiding the fact that you can't use a glottal stop to
separate two consonants in the same way you use it to separate two
vowels. Vowels at the beginning of a sentence tend to be preceded by a
glottal stop, whereas consonants (especially plosive ones) don't. So,
if you need to separate two vowels, you just pronounce the second one
as if it were at the beginning of a sentence, so to speak, but you
can't use this trick with consonants. For instance, in the sentence
"la meris. klama" I don't see how to separate "s" from "k" without
making a pause, because "k" has the same sound (as far as I can tell)
at the beginning of a sentence and in the middle of it. You can call
it a glottal stop, but I find no difference between it and a little pause.


Lojban allows an epenthetic vowel between consonants. (The so-called "buffer vowel".)


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.

I see. I had underestimated the value of having *both* conciseness and
fidelity in the same method. A major advantage of this is that I can
readily use proper names in compound/derived words (the equivalent of,
say, Whorfian, Darwinism and so on).


Indeed so.


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?


I can't recall any actual examples in English, but I think it would be
a useful feature for a language to have a way of making them.
For instance, take the phrase: "the circumstances of his
suicide/murder are not clear". In police jargon it might be useful to
have a compound word meaning "apparent suicide with some hints that
point to murder" and its form could be something equivalent to
"suicide/murder". Notice that I'm not saying it should strictly mean
"suicide OR murder". It should be an independent word with a meaning
of its own. More on that below.
Ah, good thinking. Yes: "husband/boyfriend" etc. 
--And.