Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 7:57 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 27/08/2012 20:55:

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

Formalization is easy; brevity is hard. Without brevity, what interest does the project have? Creating a (verbosely) speakable predicate logic is trivial.

You may not be thinking of what I am thinking if you believe that formalization is easy. I will try to convey to a clearer description of what I have in mind in the near future.

Brevity must be the guiding principle.

A logical language is one that encodes logical structure (predicate--argument, operator--variable structure) -- preferably unambiguously.

Brevity and logic are orthogonal principles; IMO what's important is that "do'a xrbno'a je je lgjo'a bngo'a nu je stro'a bngo'a".

> How about "sa sma se sme prmake"?
>
> prmo'e.

How come? Are you sure?

I think so. I don't like the idea that dropping a variable changes a predicate, and the most obvious interpretation rule for dropped variables is o'e.

> > 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?

I don't disagree, tho (2) is unlikely given the availability of the set of variables that are interpreted as definites when unbound.

Okay, I will have to give them a look. There has been a burst of activity and it's hard to keep up.

> It seems reasonable to me to formalize the interpretation most likely
> to prevail, and that's useful to boot.

I do disagree with this. It doesn't seem reasonable to rigidify common patterns of interpretation. For example, conjuncts linked by _and_ are commonly interpreted as presented in the sequence in which they occurred, but I think it would be a really bad idea to formalize that. And there are downsides to the proposed rule. It creates an otherwise unwanted assymmetry between the two complements of s and l. It requires holding in memory both the restrictions on variables and the name of the variable even outside the syntactic domain of the variable.

Okay some of those are good points. By the way, I was going to propose "ji" because I think it would serve a good use. It would in a sense be the opposite of "ju", indicating a sequence of events rather than a simultaneous one. "je" should definitely be purely logical.

> 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?

A specific dog, tho that specific dog could be the generic dog.

Well then I don't see the difference from "la grka". Nothing excludes a specific reading with "l-".

> 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.
>
> That was always a nice scheme, but I think that Xorban's explicitly
> bound variables tend to obviate the need for that.

But this scheme is used for predicates or referents that are repeated across sentences.

What makes this scheme better than assigning implicit restrictions to free variables across sentences? Either way, you need some variety of discourse representation theory to formally represent the persistence of the restrictive information across sentences, and I say using the variables and more at home in Xorban than using a novel morphological class of Cy-like entities. Plus, variables are actually explicitly bound to their restrictions at least once; these other things are glorked.