Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-") - engelang messages

Well, a couple of examples: parallel predicates with intertwines strings of terms (Lojban can do this -- the rules are implicit, but never spelled out);quantifiers whos scopes go beyond sentence boundaries (Lojban can do this, too, but muddles the process enormously). Of course, you say that no quantifier has scope beyond the end of the sentence to which it is prenex, but then the question is how are you going to patch up the cases in ordinary language when this happens. If you renew the quantifier every time, you lose the rhythm the instantiations -- the "he" that picks up the universal in the next sentence say. and, of course, with particular quantifiers each new binding is subject to a new instantiation, so you lose the whole continuity (a reason for l, of course). Of course, the problem is immediately pressing -- even before sentence boundaries -- if you have a case of Rako'eko'e (or whatever), which automatically puts the same thing in both slots (insofar as I can understand some of the unexplained notes).
And, of course, we have yet to see any attempts to deal with abstractions or other intensional situations.
I don't thin that any opf these are serious problems once you get a coherent base (which you do, so long as you don't talk about it), but they are unanswered questions. I shall probably come up with more as we go along.

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 7:37 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

John E Clifford, On 09/09/2012 18:13:
> Lojban has RHE problems as far as representing logical form goes. It
> also has a rather baroque set of rules for recovering form from the
> surface

CLL is silent on much or most of what would be necessary to recover form from surface.

> (though we have yet to see what Xorban will do with similar
> situations of collapsing parallel sentences, for example).

Can you list some or all of the things you think we're still waiting to see how Xorban would handle? I might have overlooked stuff, but my impression is that Xorban has pretty much everything covered and certainly hasn't failed to cover anything that Lojban obviously has covered.

> And, as I said, we have yet to see what Xorban will be like beyond
> the simplest sorts of sentences.

Such as? What do you think we aren't sure how to say?

> As for speakability, Xorban is on the road to a serious memory
> problem, keeping all the variables straight over long stretches of
> conversation, so it will eventually have to consider some forms of
> redundancy to overcome this, whether reupping or some other device.

Core Xorban requires keeping variables straight within the phrase in which they are bound. I do think it's a memory problem that the speaker and hearer have to temporarily remember the vocalic name of the variable, but the scheme has compensatory virtues like being easy to pick up and 'manually' parse. Livagian manages to avoid giving variables names, but still relies on memory by having variables identified by position in a virtual sequence, and the system is much more complicated, hard to learn, hard to manually parse than Xorban's.

The bit of Xorban that requires keeping variables straight over long stretches of conversation is not part of core Xorban, and is part only of a dialect of it that I deprecate, because I agree with you that it's bad feature for usability.

--And.