Re: [engelang] Xorban Development - engelang messages

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 5:13 PM, selpa'i <seladwa@hidden.email> wrote:

Let's say that cmavo is ... it seems all CV's are already taken. Can
cmavo be CC(V) ? Well let's pretend the cmavo is bn- (you can change it
to anything you want, this is just to describe the idea).

Since CX's phonology seems set (formally at least) and it doubtfully includes <h>, I think we should set aside "h-" permanently as a nonce operator that anyone could use for experimentation and illustration.

(Side note: Although it'd be rarely pronounced, if it needed to be then <h> could be [T]. That would leave [h\, G] as the non-clashing phonological value for <'>; <x> could then be [x, h]. Preferred basic pronunciation <x>=[x] and <'>=[h\] (breathy-voiced glottal fricative). <q> [?] and <w> [w] are already in the production rules; <y> [j] will probably end up in there in too. The phonological values of other segments is similar to Lojban.)

Then, bnV, depending on the vowel, adds a subordinate clause to the
variable V. Then the referent set of that V are restricted to only those
referents for which the subordinate clause is true:

le mlte bne li jbmi plpeki nlca'ake
I like the cat that jumped on the table.

So, (mlte _bne li jbmi plpeki_) would be the restriction versus (_bne li jbmi plpeki_ nlca'ake) the predication.

I'm not sure whether a ke'a-equivalent is needed. You could also just
force the head of the relative clause to be filling the first argument
place and making that place unfillable, but maybe this makes things less
flexible. On the other hand, it makes the sentences shorter, so that the
following means the same:

le mlte bne li jbmi plki nlca'ake

We would have to formalize that with a transformation rule:

bne F => bn2e F2
e.g. bne li jbmi plki (underlyingly "bne li jbmi plk[ek]i") => bne li jbmi plkeki

in which F2 was the equivalent of F with e stuck in all the right places in the simple formulas and bn2 was the terminal version of bn. Unfortunately, we'd have a problem with

bne je li jbmi plk[ek]i vske'e[ke]
or
bne je lo fo li jbmi plk[ek]i vske'eko
or
bne je li je pns[ek]i jbmi plk[ek]i

I don't think there is an easy way to formalize that operation.

Hmm, this actually suggests to me that a sixth vowel would be quite
useful, it would be the variable of the current sentence itself. But I
don't know what vowel to pick, I dislike using schwa for this. Maybe
instead of a new vowel, we can add a new variable, like the ones for a'a
and e'e, that refers to the current sentence, say u'a or something, then:

le zdne bnu'a li mrli ttciku'a zbsa'ake
I build a house using a hammer.
(ttc = tutci) lit. "I build a house, a hammer being the tool used to to it".

The bnu'a clause restricts the sentences referent such that it must be
true that a hammer was used to do SENTENCE. I think semantically it
would be wrong to use a bnu'a without having a u'a-suffix appear in the
predicate as well.

I would just say:

le zdne ju li mrli ttciku'a zbsa'ake
The house, a hammer being the tool used to to it, I build.

We don't have all those sentence variables of Lojban yet, but even if we did (e.g. "u'a"), then I don't quite see what putting "u'a" in "bn-" would buy us. What I'd prefer to have if we went with an afterthought conjunction of some sort is:

le zdne bne li mrli ttciku'a zbsa'ake

in which "bne" basically says, "oh yeah, I forgot to say this about the restriction of E:". But in this particular case we're not adding any (direct) information about E.

Since it attaches to the sentence, bnu'a can go anywhere before the
predicate, which is nice.

What do you think?

I think that "u'a" is a good idea and something like "bn-" is worth consideration as an afterthought conjunction.

Also, it seems there is no way to not have the predicate come last,
right? So once I've said the predicate, the sentence is over, I can't
add any more arguments. Maybe a better way of thinking about it is that
when listing the arguments, it's more like filling a prenex, and the
actual order of the arguments is decided by the affixes on the predicate.

XC predications are like those subordinate clauses in German, I think, very rigidly verb-last, but very flexible in object order.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i