Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:02 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 27/08/2012 05:20:

Brevity trumps grammatical simplicity.

Formalization is the real trick, not brevity, so formalization must trump brevity if this is to be a "logical language" and not a fancy version of Ray Brown's BrSc. Simplicity abets formalization. When formalization is complete, nothing need preclude brevity-driven overhauls and reforms.

> If you want to say "[sa sma] xkra" instead of "[la xrma] xkra", then
> you can just say "xkro'e".

How about "sa sma se sme prmake"?

prmo'e.

"There is fire" would be "fgro'e", I presume.

Yes.

> 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?

I don't see a need for free variables. Variables not explicitly bound can be implicitly bound or can be of the abbreviatory a'a sort.

(1) na sa xrja vfla. na se sme [la sma] nlveka.
"Pigs don't fly. Something has no wings."

I don't think it'd be long before humans started hearing that as:

(2) na sa xrja vfla. na se sme [la xrja] nlveka.
"Pigs don't fly. They have no wings."

... and then started hearing [la Ra] everywhere. Do you disagree? It seems reasonable to me to formalize the interpretation most likely to prevail, and that's useful to boot.

As for anaphors, I'd use a pair of predicates meaning "co'e", one with and one without a description argument as a syntactic complement. E.g. "xx-" is "co'e", "is it", and "Xz" has the extra complement, "xza qa grka" (or indifferently, "xza qo grko", "is the dog", where "q" is the ce'u quantifier and "qa grka" means "the property of being canine". maybe you wouldn't consider these anaphors, in which case I'm saying I don't see the need for anaphors.

If "xza qa grka" means is "is the dog", does that mean a specific dog, or does it mean dogs in general?

There's also the possibility of using stems like qam- (= 'am-), where qa- introduces vowelless name stems, and the name is taken to refer to something already referred to with a predicate starting with m- (ignoring any name-introducing prefix), like Lojban my.