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Hi,
-
-- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, John E Clifford <clifford-j@...> wrote:
>
>
> [..]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 [..]
My guess is that people tend to prefer artlangs because it's much less
likely for an artlanger to hear the phrase "you got it wrong" or
something equivalent from their peers, than it is for an engelanger.
>
> My memory of classes with Church is fading and my
Alonzo Church ?!!
> 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.
Some Lispers say the key is defining macros, but I presently don't
have a minimally informed opinion. I'll have to find out more.
Besides, I think that labeled brackets would greatly improve
readability and concisenes.
>
> "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)."
Oh, I see. I was mistaken in the etymology of greenhouse.
I'll try to clarify my classification of compounds (BTW, I use English
examples because I lack usable lexicon in my conlang, not because I
think it's universally useful)
A-coord-B:
something that has some combination of features of A's and B's
A-subord-B:
something that is an A , and is related in some way to those things
that are B's (other than having some features of B's) .
A-literal-B: something that belongs to the set described by "(lambda x
(A B x))" in Lisp notation.
All three cases may admit metaphoric uses, so, for instance, in
A-subord-B it may not be strictly required that everything that is a
A-subord-B is also an A . Or maybe I should keep it strict and use a
particle to indicate "metaphoric use". I haven't quite decided, but in
any case, the compound word should not be completely equivalent to a
syntactic phrase. Note that even if I don't admit metaphoric uses, the
compound can acquire its semantically independent value by having
additional restrictions.
For instance, A1-subord-B1 could mean "something that is an A1 , and
is related in some way to those things that are B1's (other than
having some features of B1's)... and is also a C1"
The idea is to have a multi-typed, hierarchical word production system
that lets speakers build new words by combining existing ones in
different ways, instead of having to create most new words from
scratch. This seems more natural, better for mnemonics and more fun.
But it should be clear that those are new words with their own
meanings, only partially determined ,at most, by their production method.
Regards,
Martin Baldan