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Re: [engelang] Xorban Development



Careful!  Xorban is so far fairly strictly forethought.  Admitting afterthoughts can open a can of worms which raise all the complexities that Lojban has to deal with -- and might require almost as complex solutions.



From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 3:01 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban Development

 
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 9:55 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:
 
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 6:13 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) ?

Those are predicates. But there's still room for more operators.


> Well let's pretend the cmavo is bn- (you can change it
> to anything you want, this is just to describe the idea).

If we were to adopt it, I would go with p-, since the current proposed
function for p-, which I haven't even added to the grammar yet, can
easily be re-assigned to a jVkV form.

Here is a way to implement selpa'i's proposal easily in the current grammar.  Call "p-" the "afterthought restriction operator".  It would be a binary operator that would look like a binder, but instead of binding a new variable, it would conjoin another restriction to the existing restriction of that variable.  The simplest example would be something like:

se mlte pe xkre vska'ake
"Some cat, a black one that is, I see it.

This would be logically equivalent to:
se je mlte xkre vska'ake.

Unlike the "bn-" operator, the "p-" operator need not immediately follow the restriction that it is modifying.  We could have:

se mlte sa grka pe xkra vskake
"Some cat, some dog, a black cat I mean, [that dog] sees [that black cat].

This would be logically equivalent to:
se je mlte xkre sa grka vskake.

I think we could even say things like:

le mlte je pe xkre nlce'eke pe blbe vska'ake
"Cats, black ones you like and white ones I like."

or even

co mlte je pe xkre nlce'eke pe blbe vska'ake
"As far as cats, you like black ones and I like white ones."

I think that's pretty cool.  The logical transformations seem pretty straightforward to me, although as usual they should be formalized.