[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> 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.
>
But variable-arity, nested expressions need nested parenthesis, and
their numbers can grow quickly. Having lots of brackets in a row is
both verbous and confusing, that's the reason for using labeled
brackets. And I don't think having right brackets only is enough for
my purposes. Let's see:
How would you represent the following expressions?:
exp1: (and (or a b) (xor c d ) e )
exp2: (and (or a b (xor c d) ) e )
Would it be something like this? :
exp1: and or a b) xor c d ) e
exp2: and or a b xor c d) e
I suspect it is. This seems much more concise, but there's a catch:
you are assuming that some
lexemes, such as "and", "or" and "xor" have the privileged status of
operators, while others, like "a", "b",
"c", "d", "e" don't, and so they can never be the "head" of an
expression, only its arguments. In Lisp, you can define new operators
all the time, and the syntax is unafected, which gives Lisp its
legendary flexibility. The problem is that you also need more
brackets. The key is to make use of this flexibility in clever ways,
to keep a reasonable number of brackets. A frequent trick is using
macros, with which you can get results just as concise as in other
notations, with the advantage that it's fully customizable. Actually,
some Lisp fans say that the ease of making powerful macros is one of
the key strong points of Lisp. So, I'll have to study the issue of
Lisp macros and see how to implement them in a spoken language.
Meanwhile, I thought it was a good idea to have a user-friendly
notation for deeply nested brackets, since I know I'll need them.
So, why Lisp notation?
Because it's so flexible.
Do I need so much flexibility?
I dunno, but at least two of the best-known knowledge representation
formats (CycL and SUO-KIF) use it. So it must be a good thing
for knowledge representation.
Is there a way to make sentences concise?
Yes, using macros. But I'll have to look into it a bit more.
I hope this helps to clarify.
> > 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".)
So, would it sound like "la meris.yklama " ?
Fair enough. Still, I prefer not to include glottal stops in my
language. I'm trying to make it
very easy to pronounce and to hear, and I find them rather irritating
to pronounce. I presume many other speakers of languages
lacking glottal stops may agree, but I haven't asked, so it's a matter
of personal preference so far. BTW, as I said, the epenthetic vowel in
my language is a "U" between two consonants, so I sacrificed 18 roots
for the sake of audibility and ease of pronunciation.
Regards,
Martin