Re: [engelang] Xorban vocative, d- & m- - engelang messages

On Sat, Sep 15, 2012 at 9:33 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 15/09/2012 05:56:

> Do we have any way of indicating something like a vocative i.e. "hey,
> you" or "yo, And"?

No, none has been proposed yet. Presumably, these expressions would contain an illocutionary of various sorts -- greeting the addressee, attracting the attention of the intended addressee, identifying the addressee (to make it clear which of various hearers is the intended addressee), expressing some kind of unasserted attitude to the addressee ("It's bedtime now, darling") -- some with a complement and some without.

> Also, can someone give me the current consensus-in-flux syntax and
> semantics of "d-" and "m-" (in a nutshell, but more elaborate than
> the official def)?

d- is a monadic predicate and takes a single complement, which contains a variable bound by d-. D- expresses an unspecified definite monadic predicate, with the complement providing some kind of (presumably nonveridical) description of the predicate.

m- is a monadic predicate and takes a single complement that is a complete phrase of any sort; m- doesn't bind any variable. The complement of m- is a name, tho we haven't considered what exactly that means:
* Just a morphologically less restricted way of generating monadic predicates?
[Probably not just.]
* Also coming without a guarantee of nonhomonymy?
[Probably Yes]
* Stored in some sort of permanent onomasticon?
[Probably No -- i.e. nonce names are allowed too]

Okay, thank you for the overview. It took me a bit to puzzle out the details and figure out the reasons, but it does seem to make sense.

I take it that "la da mlta xkra" means almost exactly, if not exactly, the same as English "The cat is black" with the definite specific reading, except that the Xorban could also be plural.

What exactly is the reason for breaking mV "is-called" out of the unary operators and allowing "is-called sentence" instead of "is-called formula"? Apparently interjections can be names. I am a little confused by this. I suppose my name could be "maike" if I wanted to be special due to my name ending with the argument separator..

Also, I see that "q ( C? V? )* q" is officially available, but no one is using qxorxeq-, qmaikq-, qandq- etc.