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Re: [engelang] Xorban Development



Jorge Llamb�as, On 24/08/2012 01:09:
On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 7:18 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>  wrote:
{zo'e} is a terrible idea, because it's so unhelpfully vague. But a V'V
for "le co'e" -- "him/her/it/them" might be a good idea. Maybe the rule
would be that V'a is interpreted as a definite reference unless explicitly
bound.

Is there any way to introduce definiteness through a predicate rather
than a variable? I would be happier if we could say that V'a is
implicitly bound by lV'a brV'a for some meaning of the predicate br.
Could we have "x1 is what we've been/are talking about" or something
like that?

Sure. I'd just meant that V'a would be an abbreviatory device, like the argument forms for "me" and "you", which also abbreviate predicates.
Let compounds be merely a concatenation of the stems. It doesn't matter
if, say, CCCC is ambiguous between CC+CC and CCCC, or CCCCC between CC+CCC
and CCC+CC: compounding would be a purely mnemonic way of forming novel
predicates, derivationally translucent.

Yes, but I was also thinking of using -z- as a kind of Lojban zei, for
more explicit compounding. In that case "z" could be avoided, though
not prohibited, in ordinary roots.

I don't think the extra length (one consonant's worth) is worth it. Indeed *not* having unambiguous decomposition of compounds would be a good thing, because unambiguous decomposition creates the illusion that compounds have fully compositional meaning, when of course compounds with fully compositional meaning are completely pointless.

--And.