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Re: [engelang] Xorban experimental tense markers



Jorge Llamb�as, On 29/09/2012 22:47:
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.

The contents of q...q is raw phonological material, whereas the complement of mV is a single phrase, and therefore has syntactic (and hence semantic) structure.

(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.

Right. I'm happy to consider fV essential.
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

I think that would be exactly my list, too. Possibly lV could be reduced to xV, tho. Arguably illocutionaries, including ca, could also be reduced to simple-formulas too.

That would leave, minimally,

xV
fV
simple-formula

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"

Yes, "la jtfa fa bcdi" is the ticket.
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.

Yes, okay; I agree. I'd been thinking that -oi would serve to postpone fV-clauses, but as you point out this can be achieved by changing "la fa li bcdi fghi jnva'aka" into "la jnva'aka fa la bcdi fghi".

--And.