Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 11:03 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 28/08/2012 02:33:
> Glossing over the quotatives for a moment, that would make {la
> "djan"a} mean (in Lojban) {zo .djan.} instead of {la .djan.}. To get
> {la .djan.} you'd need {la "djan"ako'e}. Surely the latter, which
> we'll need much more often, should have the shorter form.*

Fine. I thought that by saying "Y (is known as X to) Z" you were intending that the suffixes should by VkV always. I agree a plain V suffix is warranted for brevity. I also think my suggestion was independently poor because it wouldn't allow for the quoted string to contain /q/.

I was thinking that this particular ("Class I") quotative would be used for nouns, both common and proper, non-fussily transliterated from various natural languages into a string of Xorban segments. The transliteration could not contain Xorban's own <q>=/?/, but neither could it contain English's /T/ nor French's /y/. I was thinking that one could use a more powerful but more complicated ("Class II") quotative for quoting a broader range phonological material.

> The need for referencing the name is less urgent than in Lojban,
> because people can say {"djan"a'a} ="I am John" or {la prmaka'a
> "djani"a'aka}="I am 'Johnny' to my friends." Of course we do need to
> reference the name. How about:
>
> CV1+ X + q = "x"(y, z) which means "Y (is known as X ending in vowel to) Z
> CV2+ X + q = "x"(y, z) which means "Y (is known as X ending in cons. to) Z

I'm not sure it's worth it. Ambiguity over whether the last vowel was included would occur only with /@/, and that ambiguity is livable with.

I thought of exactly this myself yesterday! I think the rule for /@/ is like that of /?/ in "Class I" names; /@/ is reserved for Xorban's internal uses and therefore is not a segment available to be transliterated into. English "Jessica" = /'djE.s1.k@/ might then be transliterated <CVdjesikaq-> where the English /@/ is transliterated as /a/ to indicate the original final vowel, and Xorban /@/ remains free to buffer /dj/. "Mark" would be transliterated <CVmarkq-> -- no original final vowel, no original vowel between /rk/ either.

> CV3+ X + q = "x"(y) which means "Y (is the name X ending in vowel)
> CV4+ X + q = "x"(y) which means "Y (is the name X ending in cons.)

Probably better to go for a method that allows q to occur within quotes. I.e. a zoi-ish system.

Yes, probably. If you need to talk about a name, then you probably want the "Class II" quotative.

> *Moreover, I think that all elided trailing variables are implicitly
> "o'e",

I'm not too happy with that. First of all, it requires a rule that multiple unbound o'e are independently bound, i.e. o'eko'e is not reflexive, and I'm not sure such a rule would be desirable.

Right, the idea that I had was that "o'e" was equivalent to an elided argument, and vice versa, and that each underlying occurrence of "Po'e" would be interpreted as "lX smX PX" where X was a unique anonymous variable -- I would introduce X just in case "la sma" by itself wasn't vague enough, as there is still confusion about the exact semantics of "l-" and "l- sm-.

Second, it overprivileges the ordinal priority of suffixes, and creates competing imperatives for ordinal priority -- is ordering done by semantic role or by frequency of being o'e-bound and hence elidable?

I am afraid I don't follow. Perhaps it would help to explain why "a'a" doesn't create the same sort of problem.

Rather, each stem should have its definition relative to its number of arguments. PtkV and PtkVkV are different predicates, tho it may be that PtkV happens to be defined as an abbreviation of PtkVkV.

I am afraid I can't imagine a situation in which it would be helpful to allow PtkV not to be defined as an abbreviation of PtkVkV; it seems a disadvantage to arbitrarily allow predicates to have more than one lexical entry.