On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 2:28 PM, And Rosta
<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
An alternative system (much more like Livagian) would be to mark the argument-place by the vowel type (e.g. "love" would be prmi'u & prmu'i) and then order the vowels so that they are syntactically bound by nested binder--bindee relations. A huge virtue of this system is that the (fluent) speaker needn't memorize variables' names, because variables have no names, being purely syntactic with no morphological form. The downside is that the rules for binder--bindee relations are likely to be either too restrictive or very complicated or require a load of extra inflectional marking. But this would be a huge change from the basic workings of Xorban.
I like this. Most of my sketches have had a feature like this. If you limit your predicates to three arguments, and you encode them by <a i u> respectively, you can transparently represent any number & order of arguments e.g. dndi, dndua, dndui, dndaiu, etc.
But I would hate to see Xorban changed like that. What's neat about Xorban right now is that if you exclude "l-", "m-" and "d-", what you're left with is a pure FOL practically isomorphic to standard notation.
> Well then I don't see the difference from "la grka". Nothing excludes
> a specific reading with "l-".
If l- is equivalent to q-, as Jorge suggested, then l- does exclude a specific reading.
But anyway, xx- and xz- encode that there definitely is a "co'e" element (and maybe also that the description is nonveridical).
I am pretty sure that "l-" is simply a conflation of xorlo "lo le la" (which is probably what Jorge has wanted "lo" to mean for a long time). I hope he will chime in if this statement is far off base.
> > 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,
Explain further. I don't see this need, but probably I don't understand well enough what you mean.
Using the implicit-restriction approach, the formalization posits a discourse representation structure of some sort that "remembers" previous sentences in the discourse and derives an implicit restriction for a free variable (say "a") based on the most recent binding of "a" in a previous sentence; if such a binding does not exist, then "a" is bound using "sma" as the restriction.
In the onset-anaphor approach, the way I *think* it would work, the formalization posits a discourse representation structure of some sort that "remembers" previous sentences in the discourse, and for every qa- stem (say "qam") substitutes the predicate appearing most recently starting with the corresponding phoneme; if such a predicate is not found, I assume that "sm-" is substituted.
Either way, the formalization needs to remember data from previous sentences in order to assign the intended meaning to a current sentence. The basic insight here is that the intended meaning of a sentence in the flow of discourse can't be constructed on the basis of that sentence alone.
Here are examples of the two anaphoric approaches.
implicit-restriction approach:
cu le mlte vske'eke? ni vska'ake.
= cu le mlte vske'eke? ni [le mlte] vska'ake.
"Do you see the cat? Indeed I see it [cat]"
onset-anaphor approach (as best as I can tell):
cu le mlte vske'eke? ni le qame vska'ake.
"Do you see the cat? Indeed I see the C [cat]"
Notice that in the implicit-restriction approach, the variable itself is effectively anaphoric. In the onset-anaphor approach, "qame" needs to be bound. You might as well directly say "le mlte" a second time; what is the difference?
In the implicit-restriction approach, the variable's implicit binding can be sustained as long as the speaker likes, as long as he does not rebind that variable.
In the onset-anaphor approach, as soon as another predicate starting with "m" appears, "qame" is changed in meaning. What's a speaker to do, avoid predicates starting with "m"?
Moreover, in the implicit-restriction approach, any explicitly free variable can be implicitly restricted by an arbitrarily long formula, just as it was in the original restriction. In the onset-anaphor approach, as best as I can tell, you're stuck with simple predicate substitution. The latter hardly pays its way for the added complexity to the language.
In short, the onset-anaphor approach seems a well enough stop-gap for Lojban but it is needlessly onerous in Xorban, which already demands speakers to track variables, which is an essential and unavoidable feature in the language. What is avoidable is forcing speakers to track *predicate onset consonants* in previous sentences
too!
>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.
As Xorban stands, you don't have to understand it as involving restrictions on variables, and I like that. That is, in "l/s/ra bcda fgha", "bcda" needn't be understood as a restriction.
Of course it's possible that this is merely terminological: if definites have antecedents, the antecedents will (in Xorban) be properties, and the dependents of l/s/r can be understood as encoding properties, and then all your rule is doing is privileging the first dependent and associating the property it denotes with vowel used for the variable in it. Still, even then I dislike privileging the first dependent (because of the arbitrariness and the lack of a way to target the second dependent) and obliging interlocutors to make a mental note of the vowel associated with each first dependent (because of the big extra mostly-superfluous load on working memory).