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


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

Re: [engelang] Xorban Development



On Fri, Aug 24, 2012 at 3:49 AM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

We don't quite have a proper definition for "ju" though.

 ju bra cre <-> li smi je brafi crefi

is fine, but it only deals with how ju works with two predicates. When
joining two general formulas things get more complicated because -fi
isn't directly attached to a formula. Every formula ends with a
predicate though, so is it enough to say that the -fi provided by ju
is attached to the final predicate of the formula? Is it just:

ju "formula1" "formula2" <-> la sma je "formula1"-fa "formula2"-fa

? Probably not.

> [...] So the rule probably should be
> that every "ju" f-binds all predicates anywhere in its scope, except for
> those in "ju" child trees.

I don't know if that works either. You could have lots of things going
on inside there and we probably don't want all subordinate predicates
to be about the same event. I think what we need is for the resulting
equivalent predicate to take the -fa, but I'm not sure how to
formulate that.

> 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.

I'm thinking that at least predicates used in the restrictions of
quantifiers will have to be excluded.

> 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.

I think it's possible, but some ingenuity will be needed to get the rule right.

mu'o mi'e xorxes