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Re: [engelang] Xorban experimental tense markers



On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 3:59 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> The syntactic apparatus of a loglang divides into the essential, without
> which the requisite meaning cannot be encoded, and the inessential,
> introduced for usability purposes such as brevity. Of the Xorban unary
> operators, all are inessential, apart from mV and fV.

Arguably mV is redundant to "q...qV", which is more general.

> (fV doesn't have to be
> a unary operator, but if it weren't then some other device would have to be
> introduced, such as the fV argument marker that the current fV unary
> operator replaced.)

There are some things that fV can do that the marker couldn't, or at
least not as readily.

>What Xorban calls "simple-formulas" are essential.

Presumaly some of them are and others can be defined in terms of
those. My list of "essentials" so far would be:

ca
fV
lV
xV
(certain) simple-formulas

> Mike says that binary operators are a generalized way of creating [unary]
> operators from predicates. E.g. "na bcdi" is "je jtfa fa bcdi".

"je jfta fa bcdi" has a free "a", which "na bcdi" doesn't have,
(though I guess you could say it's "[la sma] je jfta fa bcdi) so I
would suggest "la fa bcdi jtfa" or, from a somewhat more cryptic point
of view, "la jtfa fa bcdi"

> But that
> isn't abbreviatory. I had formerly suggested "jtfoi bcdi", where "oi" marks
> a simple-formula as taking as its complement another formula that binds the
> argument-place marked by "oi". That would be an inessential device for
> enhanced usability, which generalizes to all simple-formulas.
>
> As a result of this message, I've talked myself into proposing the
> resurrection of "oi", and the replacement of some of the existing unary
> operators by CC stem + oi.

"CCoi" saves two syllables (or just one in CX) compared with "la CCa
fa", but it's also less flexible, since it can only convert stems, not
any formula.

co ma'a xrxe