On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 8:37 PM, And Rosta
<and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
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.
Like everyone else, I have been trying to get my head around this for only a couple weeks. It's risky to make predictions at this early stage, but IMHO Xorban variables are mainly a problem for the speaker. I do not think that variables are so much a problem for the listener, as they can be thought of as a simple double-(triple-?)marking concord system that makes things totally clear, because bindings are usually a short distance from their predications, and when they are used with implicit bindings later, context helps reinforce the old bindings. I predict that when you hear a binding, you'll remember it once you get used to it, which is why I plug the implicit binding rule for free variables.
The problem that I anticipate when people start writing or speaking longer sentences and longer patches of sentences is deciding what variable to use on the fly. In that case, the speaker is forced to choose a variable for every BR-_expression_ that he introduces into the sentence, and he needs to choose negatively, i.e. in the sense "which ones are not taken, which ones do I not want to override right now". This is a big contrast from natural languages where the "variable" i.e. gender/number/etc. marking, is determined lexically and therefore the speaker chooses the marker positively--he chooses it based on what the grammar and semantics say.
The upshot of this I believe is that part of speaking Xorban well will be adopting stylistic conventions to help manage all this. For example, perhaps "i" will be used for BR-_expression_ + case tag, which composes a formula and therefore avails "i" for immediate reuse. Since case tags introduce oblique dependents which are usually not too salient to the overall discourse, "i" would rarely be free in subsequent sentences. So we can make a stylistic decision to (usually) reserve "i" for short range. Perhaps "a" and "e" will be the subject/topic and focus of a sentence and appear free much more often in later sentences. In other words, "a" and "e" perhaps will be more salient than other variables, sentence to sentence. Conventions like this can give a little order, but I doubt we can predict all of this in advance.
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.
Here is where usage can rightfully decide. If it doesn't work, it will fall out of usage in short order, and what does work will rise to the top. Since we are talking about style and not language fundamentals, we are not harming the language by allowing usage to decide what works for humans in this one area.