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Re: [engelang] Xorban Development


On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 8:34 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 27/08/2012 01:20:

>The reasons are:
>
> 1. The grammar doesn't allow variables to be suffixed to operators.

OK, but that could change. The difference between predicates and operators is only syntactic; operators are a kind of abbreviation of predicates.

It's not a question for me, but I suspect that most changes to the production rules, even small ones, are going to be declined at this early stage.  There are a couple areas where I feel an urge to add syntactic sugar myself, but I think we have to hang in there for now.

 
> 2. If it were allowed, usually jefa would require "a" to be bound as "la sma jefa", which adds a lot of verbosity.

"I saw there was a cat and a dog" could be "za je vskaika jefa (zi) mlti (zu) grku", where {z} is unary existential quantifier, and {ai} is the variable that when unbound means "me" (I can't remember off the top of my head what form Jorge had for it).

Okay, I think I can see your point.  The predicates in my own LL sketches have never had event arguments, so I have almost zero intuition as to whether the subordinate clauses where explicit event arguments are needed outweigh the main clauses where they can just as well be anonymous.

IIRC Jorge did say that he'd make "ju" a binding operation with its own C if he saw a sufficient need.

 
> 3. Also, the interpretation and transformation rule would have to be
> determined precisely in the same way ju would have to be.

X-fa is the state of affairs in which X is the case. Is there more needs to be said than that?

I can't answer that without knowing a little better how your events work.  In your proposal, are (1) and (2) equivalent?

(1) la xrma le sme jefe bjra stra
(2) la xrma le sme je bjrafe strafe