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--- Mart�n Bald�n <martinob@hidden.email> wrote:
---------------------------------
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.
Slightly cynical, but at least partly right.
Many of them are into artlangs secondarily to
being into world creation, although at least one
at the conference has the Tolkien syndrome --
world creating to have a place for the artlang.
And someone there told someone else that they
were wrong about some feature, so the external
corrections are possible even in artlangs (I seem
to recall someone corrected Tolkien on someething
in Elvish (?).)
>
> My memory of classes with Church is fading and
my
Alonzo Church ?!!
Yes; at both Princeton and UCLA. I am ancient
(see phto at conlangs.berkeley.edu)
> 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.
Y4s, *labelled* brackets would probably help but
are bound to fail concision unless you get some
good conventions that allow dropping a goodly
percentage of them. Most languages have such
conventions; LISP is totally explicit.
>
> "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.
Which I can no longer read, so I forget just what
ABx amounts to: "good hunter" model ("good at
hunting," so a hunter but not good or even good
as hunters go, the goodness directly modifies
(and is modified by) the hunting) ?
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 would, if you are using this language for
anything like Lojbanic literalness.
I haven't quite decided, but in
any case, the compound word should not be
completely equivalent to a
syntactic phrase.
Good. Lojban suffers from an excess of
literalness and strict equivalence, with the
result that compounds are often both ugly and
pedestrian.
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.
This is probably the linguistic parallel to
building macros, though a bit freer.