[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >

[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: [engelang] Xorban Development

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:
 

On Thu, Aug 23, 2012 at 3:16 PM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> la xrma le sme je strafe bjrafe
> "The horse is swiftly running."
>
> This is probably going to be common enough of a construction that we'll
> want a shortcut. I propose a new binary, "joy":
>
> la xrma joy bjra stra
> "A/the horse in the same event runs and is fast."
> "The horse runs fast."
>
> ... in which some variable is bound and understood to be f-suffixed to
> "bjra" and "stra". This variable could be anonymous, or better yet, assign
> it as "oy" to match "joy" (understood as bound as "loy smoy" until assigned
> again) for possible use elsewhere.

I like it, but I'd use "ju" which is available. If it turns out it
would be useful to have the vowel be a variable rather than there
purely for morphological reasons, I would say use a different
consonant as a new binding operator.

Okay.  Sounds good.

 
> There is a question regarding the nesting of "joy"s. Should we keep
> repeating "joy" or is "je" sufficient for nested subsentences. In other
> words the question is of rendering "The horse runs fast and happily" as:
>
> la xrma joy bjra joy stra glka
>
> ... versus
>
> la xrma joy bjra je stra glka
>
> I prefer the sound of the second.

They are logically equivalent once joy/ju is expanded, right?

ki'e mi'e xorxes
 _._,
They are logically equivalent assuming that a "ju" recursively binds the event-variable of (f-binds) every predicate inside its scope including those inside all sorts of child expressions.  But what happens when a lower-level "ju" appears inside a larger "ju"-tree?  At first, I thought it might have no effect, but now that I think of it, there will probably be times when we want to let the lower "ju" do its own thing.  So the rule probably should be that every "ju" f-binds all predicates anywhere in its scope, except for those in "ju" child trees. 

Probably what we really need to do is to start writing down every interpretation rule - one for each unique syntactic operation, and particularly one for each binary operator.  Also, what to do about things like free variables in predicates.  We have some of these already.  Most likely one rule will be that f-unbound predicates look up the tree for the nearest "ju" and use the event-variable it is binding; otherwise, some default.

The generative rules get us the sentence but the interpretation rules get us the meaning.  It will get complicated, but since this grammar is so miniscule, I am actually thinking it is possible.