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Mike S., On 30/08/2012 06:33:
On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 2:28 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto: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.
I agree that Xorban is simple and neat in itself, and can usefully stand as a model of simplicity and grockability.
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.
This isn't how I meant the onset-anaphor approach to work. There's no remembering the previous sentence(s) or recency or stuff -- human language doesn't work that way. Rather, when you hear stem "qam", you think "Ah, that's short for something (whose name) begins with M", and then you look around for salient entities in the discourse context, and look up their names in the lexicon/onomasticon to find one (whose name) begins with M. If Mike's just walked into the room, it could be denoting Mike; if a cat, mlt-, has been being talked about, it could be denoting the cat.
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?
mlt- is always "is feline", whereas qam- might be "is that cat you were just talking about".
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"?
No, qam- is homonymous -- each sense is something beginning with M. There's nothing analogous to holding in memory a series of vowel--restriction pairings.
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.
There is no added complexity whatever, simply a convention that monoconsonantal onomastic stems tend to be used taking into account the name of the thing being referred to. I can see the virtues of the implicit-restriction approach; I just think it violates the workings of human language too much.
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!
There's no tracking of predicate onset consonants. It's true that Xorban does demand tracking of variable vowels, but that's a necessary evil as it were -- it buys the simplicity and grockability -- and the tracking need only be within the syntactic domain governed by the binder.
>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).
I am almost surely not glorking this properly (and I do regret that),
but I don't see how the implicit-restriction solution privileges any
dependent; it merely garbage-picks an already used binding to effect
a reasonable and very likely intended restriction for a free variable
in another sentence. The fact that the original binding was used in
the first place is evidence enough that it was useful; the notion
that other free variables in that formula *might* be useful seems
secondary.
Given "la mlta xkra" and "ra mlta xkra", a following sentence "mrsa" means "la mlta mrsa" not "la xkra mrsa". This is arbitrary. The complaint about arbitrariness is in addition to the stronger complaint about the heavy and wasteful load placed on working memory.
Xorban doesn't have any clear way to express definiteness that I know of. I think Jorge is pretty content with his "one size fits all" "l-" binder.
Unbound V'i are definites, there is a pending unary operator for definiteness, and there is or can be an ordinary predicate (I'd been using xx- I think) for it. --And.