Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 9:14 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Jorge Llambías, On 27/08/2012 01:40:

> On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 9:01 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>>
>> Some miscellaneous comments:
>>
>> 1. I'd like to see unary existential and universal quantifiers, and also a
>> unary counterpart of l- (but see (4)). Particularly with existentials, one
>> doesn't always have any restriction.
>
> You can use the non-restriction restriction "sm": "sa sma blna", "some
> x is blue", "something is blue".
>
> I'm not sure it's worth assigning three additional consonants for this.

Okay, then I'd like s and l to be unary. Or at least, that would be what I'd go for first in the absence of reasons not to. I suppose that binary "sa X-a Y-a" saves a je, because the unary version would be "sa je X-a y-a", but then the unary allows "sa blna" without the dummy predicate in "sa sma blna".

There may be good reasons for doing this, though I myself have gotten used to having the restriction and would prefer to use "sm-" when I don't need a restriction (which implicitly binds the anaphors that you don't like) rather than "je" when I do. Maybe in the end we will find that we have the three Cs left over to make everything short.

In the meantime, what this proposal would do in the short term is give "l-" and "s-" a different grammar than "r-" and "d-" which would make the grammar slightly harder to learn, and would make formalization slightly more complex. For example, in my "ju" proposal, I had to treat coordinators, binders and unary operators differently. This proposal would force the formalization to make a 4-way distinction. I think that, when in doubt, everything not inherently broken that can be kept be as simple as possible should be, at least in this early stage.

>> 3. I would allow variables to be implicitly bound, so that "brda" with
>> unbound "a" is short for "za brda", where "z" is unary existential
>> quantifier. This would mean that in "(sa xrma (lu bjrafu vska'aku)) (xkra)",
>> "xkra" is short for "za xkra".
>
> We already allow implicit binding. The proposed rule was that the free
> variable is implicitly bound by "l" with the same restriction that
> that same variable was bound last time it was used. Your example is
> thus equivalent to "(sa xrma (lu bjrafu vska'aku)) ([la xrma] (xkra))"

I'd argue against this interpretation rule for two reasons. First, it means that to circumvent it you either have to use overt binding or have to search for a variable that has not previously been bound (within what span of text?). Second, the speaker-hearer should have to keep track only of syntactic binding, not keep a mental note ofall or some variable--restriction pairings in the prior text.

If you want to say "[sa sma] xkra" instead of "[la xrma] xkra", then you can just say "xkro'e". Of course, that's a very simple case. If you wanted to say something like "[sa sma] je cmla xkra", = "sm is small and black" instead of "[la xrma] je cmla xkra", then you can take advantage of the restriction syntax and rebind "a" -> "sa cmla xkra" = "sm little is black".

I think if you've lost track of what a variable's implicit restriction it makes sense to rebind it explicitly. I myself have a notion of how I plan to these variables straight in my head.

All of that aside, would provide any method way to create a sort of anaphor that would be represented by free variables? If so, how would it work?