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

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 6:47 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:10 AM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
> By the way, do you have any
> more information on the design you are working on?

"Working on" is a bit of an overstatement, all I have is what I've
posted here. The grammar I have in mind is something like this:

This is pretty much the closest thing to spoken FOL that I have ever seen.

sentence := predicate | operator sentence

operator := unary-operator | binary-operator

binary-operator:= SV('V)* sentence

unary-operator := NV('V)*

predicate := CCC*V('V)*(KV('V)*)*

V := a | e | i | o | u

C:= b | c | d | f | g | j | k | l | m | n | p | r | s | t | v | w | x | y | z

S:= (some subset of C)

N:= (some subset of C)

K:= (some subset of C)

V('V)* are used mostly as variables, except in some operators. I
didn't mention any unary operator so far, but negation (say "na")
would belong here. ("na tvla'ake'e", "I'm not talking to you").

I hadn't seen the full thread on Jboske until yesterday. I think it's perfectly sensible to reserve two variables for "me" and "you". This is pretty much what deictic references are, variables bound by discourse circumstances. We'd probably want several of these, actually.

And's event-argument provides a good way to handle subordinate
clauses. I have "k" as the core arguments separator, I would add "f"
as a way of adding an event argument to any predicate. So we can have
for example:

Thank you for giving me a glimpse of how And's event slots work and are meant to be be used. Has there been a previous discussion/description of them anywhere on Jboske or Conlang-L or elsewhere?

la le nnle li nxli tvlekifa vska'aka
The x which the y which is a boy the z which is a girl, y talks to z
in x, I see x
I see the boy talking to the girl.

I take it that the {l-} encodes something like specificity or definiteness, but what is the exact meaning and logical mechanism? What are the other basic quantifiers? {r-} for universal and perhaps {s-} for existential?

How are generics as in "I like chocolate" handled in this language?

Alternatively, and perhaps easier to parse:

la nnla le nxle li tvlakefi vska'aki
The boy, the girl, the event in which he talks to her, I see it.

Also perhaps things like:

la nnla le nxle ri tvlekafi xnrafi
The boy, the girl, every time she talks to him, he blushes.

Is the scope of {a} and {e} here wider than that of {e} and {i} in the earlier example? Are there situations in which variables like {a} "stick" and become essentially anaphora, and if so when? In which situations are they short scope?

One other thing I thought about is numbers. I would not make them
quantifiers as in Lojban, but just ordinary predicates: "x1 is one",
"x1 are two", "x1 are three", etc, basically Lojban's "PA mei". They
could be constructed by assigning a letter to each digit and then
reserving a prefix (say nm-) to form each predicate: nmpa "a is one",
nmra "a are two", nmxxxa "a are 666".

I am curious about "noun phrase"/term syntax but I think I've asked enough questions for now.

That's about all I have so far.