[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: [engelang] Xorban Terminology



On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 4:33 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
 

In connection with one of my problems, where do you place m and d?  f?

They're all unaries, and probably better covered in a primer than in a glossary.

"m" just creates a one-place predicate out of a formula meaning "is known/named by this formula".

"d" is the definite operator, which I take to mean a discourse-dependent choice function picking the salient entities out of a larger extension.  For any formula F, "da F" is the discourse-salient entities fitting "a" in F.  I assume it'd be pretty close to English "the".  If the current topic is a restaurant, "the food" is the food served by that restaurant.  If the current topic is a friend's house, "the kids" are the kids living in that house.  Definites also refer back to entities introduced by indefinites, presumably in Xorban that'd be "s-".  We haven't seen a lot of examples of "d-", so I am not sure this isn't already covered by "l-".

"fa F" means "A is a situation in which F occurs/is true".  I see it as a chunk of space-time.  We've seen plenty of examples of this so far.

--
co ma'a mke

Xorban blog: Xorban.wordpress.com
My LL blog: Loglang.wordpress.com