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Re: [engelang] Re: [jboske] LoCCan3 development ideas.



On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 3:39 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
 

Jorge Llambías, On 03/08/2012 02:37:


> On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 2:10 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>>
>> 2. Create a loglang that satisfies the key requirement of
>> unambiguously encoding explicit logical forms in a way that is no
>> less concise than the corresponding natlang or Lojban sentences
>> (which are not unambiguous and explicit).
>
> How about using only consonants for predicates and vowels and vowel
> strings (a, e, i..., a'a, a'e ..., a'a'a, ...) as the variables.
> Hopefully you would rarely need more than five variables at a time. So
> for example if "r" is the universal quantifier, "mlt" means "x1 is a
> cat" and "xkr" means "x1 is black", then "ra mlta xkra" means "every
> cat is black". If "s" is the existential quantifier, "ntrl" means "x1
> is a natural number" and "flw" means "x1 follows x2", then we have "ra
> ntrla se ntrle flweka" (where "k" is the argument separator for
> predicates with two arguments): "For every natural number x, there's a
> natural number y such that y follows x". If "l" is the quantifier
> "the", then "la mlta xkra", "the cat is black". Connectives and unary
> operators such as negation would be of CV form where the vowel is not
> a variable, so if "je" is "and", we have: "la djna le mrye je prmake
> prmeka": "John loves Mary and Mary loves John".

You'd want to add some mechanism for omitting the variable when it would correspond to Lojban {zo'e}. Since the scheme already allows for the omission of terminal arguments (i.e. "love(x,y)" can be "lvake" or "lva" with the second argument implicit), one solution would be to have different versions of the predicate for each possible ordering of the arguments, tho that's not a very economical use of morphological predicate space: you'd need two versions of each dyadic predicate, six of each triadic, 24 of each tetradic, 120 of each pentadic; and various of the contrasts would often be redundant (e.g. for a triadic predicate with two implicit args, there'd be a redundant two-way choice of predicate; for a triadic predicate with no implicit args, there'd be a redundant six-way choice of predicate). There are more economical schemes, but I think they'd all entail using up a bit of predicate space in order to provide the marking sufficient to allow for implicit arguments.

--And.

Pentadic predicates?  I would keep predicates lean and mean.  There is really no need for bloat-happy hijinks à la Lojban. The majority of predicates are going to have 1 or 2 inherent places, and very few need more than 3.  I would argue that _all_ predicates can be decomposed into predicates of no more than _2_ places.  Take "give" for example, with 3 inherent places.  This can be represented by two predicates syntactically combined:

xfr:  Ax transfers Px
kl: Pk passes to Tk

so prna xfrai so mlti kliu ro vrbu.
Some person (Ax) gave a cat (Px=Pk) to every child (Tk).

If all predicates are kept to 2 places, then we will be able to afford suppletive forms for the inverse/passive and reflexive of common predicates as you suggested.  The rest can be formed regularly using particles.  The number of possible operations is relatively small if one insists on 2-place predicates; it quickly starts to get complicated if you go even to 3.  By the way, {zi'o} will never be needed because bogus places simply won't be admitted into predicate semantics.

I think the best way to link the place structures of syntactically combined predicates is by simply adopting Richard Morneau's system of three archetypical thematic relations called agent (A), patient (P), and theme (T) (the last Morneau calls "focus").  These can represented by vowels a/i/u.  Clauses can be composed of serial predicates as in the example above, or you can derive case tags like Morneau if you prefer;  there is only one agent- and/or one patient-arguments per clause, each of which is governed by any number of co-predicates of the correct types; there are any number of theme-arguments, each governed by exactly one co-predicate.  In my tinkering I have found that there are only four open-class predicate types needed:  (A,P) "A does something to P", (A,T) "A does something using T", (P) "P is something", and (P,T) "P has something to do with T".   There is also a need for a closed class of coordinating particles with arbitrary valency (P, T1, T2, T3,... ) but I'll leave that out for now.