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Re: [engelang] Xorban Development



Jorge Llamb�as, On 30/08/2012 23:37:
On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 10:29 AM, And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>
wrote:

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.

I'm trying to figure out the meaning of this operator (which we
tentatively had assigned to "ne" before), especially with respect to
how it works on a formula with more than one free variable, or with
no free variables. What does "ne la nnla le nxle tvlake" mean?

The complement of ne must be an open/incomplete proposition, i.e. must contain an unbound variable. It's analogous to "co'e voi". So it looks to me as if  "ne la nnla le nxle tvlake" is illformed, given the current state of the grammar.

What does "la nnla le nxle ne tvlake" mean? Does "ne" infuse
definiteness to both a and e in both cases? That doesn't seem quite
right.

Good question. I had originally thought, once you'd suggested "ne", that we could get away with not marking on the operator the variable it binds (i.e. the ke'a in co'e voi ke'a).

Perhaps we need a new consonant that can take a variable (say
t-). "t-" would have to operate on a formula with at least one
unbound variable, and leave the variable unbound: "la ta nnla le nxle
tvlake". Would that work?

Exactly.

And then "la nnla le nxle ta tvlake" means something like "A girl is such that a boy is the one that talks to her" -- hard to put into English, but well-formed.

--And.