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Re: [engelang] The death of Tsar Boris



On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 9:34 PM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:

le {past}e fe la qborisqa [ha'e] mrsa je so lklyo ho la dtca gsnake so lklyo ho ju li vndi plno'eki gsno'eke.
That Boris [in reality] died was both likely caused by the Germans and likely caused (by someone) using poison.

Revised:

le fe la qborisqa ha'e mrsa je so lklyo ho la dtca gsnake so lklyo ho ju li vndi plno'eki gsno'eke.
The fact that Boris died was both likely caused by the Germans and likely caused (by someone) using poison.

Notes:

Remove {past}e from the above, get a better parse, and save the half-baked tense logic for another day.

By "so lklyo ho" I really mean "in most worlds".   I don't know how to say "many".

The subordinate clause, which is the restriction of the "le" binding, definitely needs a "ha'e" to be realis, because in the formalism I am working on, the restrictions are generally either intensional, or in the world of the predication, and these predications are irrealis.

The whole sentence is supposed to happen in the whatever default world is the topic of the discourse, but in this case the default world clashes with explicit ones, because the main predication is (doubly) irrealis.

[_ha'e_] le fe la qborisqa ha'e mrsa je so lklyo _ho_ la dtca gsnake so lklyo _ho_ ju li vndi plno'eki gsno'eke
le fe la qborisqa ha'e mrsa [_ha'e_] je so lklyo la dtca _ho_ gsnake so lklyo ju li vndi _ho_ plno'eki _ho_ gsno'eke
le fe la qborisqa ha'e mrsa je so lklyo la dtca [_ha'e_] _ho_ gsnake so lklyo ju li vndi [_ha'e_] _ho_ plno'eki [_ha'e_] _ho_ gsno'eke
 
Two world operators makes absolutely no sense, but we know that an inner binding trumps an outer one any day of the week, and luckily this is what we want:

hW2 hW1 F => hW1 F

le fe la qborisqa ha'e mrsa je so lklyo la dtca _ho_ gsnake so lklyo ju li vndi _ho_ plno'eki _ho_ gsno'eke

So the default outer "ha'e" is completely ignored which is what we want.  It's not as complicated as it seems.

I don't see any way to shorten this with the tools that we have now, but I think I have the logical form correct, and it's shorter than the English gloss!