On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 9:50 AM, selpa'i
<seladwa@hidden.email> wrote:
The following may sound harsh, but it's not meant to be.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to have tense markers at all in Xorban.
I am not sure why the tense markers seem so widely disliked, but whatever the reason, the blame for their existence is solely mine. The reason I introduced them was to allow experimentation with the tense-logic operators found in mathematics and philosophy; see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-temporal/
I gave them a subgroup under the experimental "h-", which I am relatively sure isn't going to be a consonant in CX. I am not demanding anyone use them nor do I think it's supercritical they have short forms in the final language. If I was going to push for short forms in the TAM arena, then I would push for perfective, imperfective, and possibly perfect and prospective aspect markers, probably in that order. Short tense markers are less important IMHO.
Big parts of Xorban are already heading towards in the direction of
Lojban, which some here like to call a failed attempt at a loglang, but
now you're doing the same thing.
I am curious about in exactly what areas you see X heading in the direction of Lojban.
I'm not seeing any advantages that
Xorban has over Lojban, nor any clear differences if you keep doing
this. You either have to admit that Lojban isn't as messed up as you
say, or that you are unable to create something better yourself. How is
Xorban any better than Lojban? I'm not at all opposed to Xorban, but I
see fewer and fewer differences between it and Lojban as the development
of Xorban progresses.
I am not sure what you want out of your loglang, but what I'd like to see is a fully formalized semantics. That is, for every syntactic rule there's a clear, relatively easy-to-understand, model-theoretical, truth-conditional semantic rule to go along with that. I really don't want to contribute to the dogpile on top of Lojban, but the simple, unfortunate fact is that its overarching complexity makes specifying such a formal semantics a gargantuan if not frankly impossible task. Xorban makes it nearly as simple as can be conceived.
If you import tense markers, maybe they'll end up being prepositions
like in Lojban, and soon you'll have all of BAI and FAhA as well. I
personally don't think Lojban is half bad, but some of you clearly do,
so I don't understand why you would allow these things into Xorban.
Then tense markers were put in an existing "selma'o" and defined according to Lojban predicates and a nonce predicate meaning "the event of this very sentence". I was hoping that everything about them would be simple and clear.
I thought Xorban was supposed to be simple grammatically, and "logical"
whatever that means. If it is indeed supposed to remain simple, then you
don't even need any new mechanisms for tense, you already have ju. If
you accept my sentence variable u'a, then any tense can be expressed
using the appropriate predicate and a ju-clause. Where such a predicate
is missing, a new one should be created.
For example:
"I will go to the store." Is the same as "My going to the store is in
the future [of now]."
Using ju + u'a, we get:
le zrce ju lo cbno blvu'ako klma'ake
If it were made part of the language, the sentence variable u'a would have to get a definition in the form of an implicit binding. One possible candidate is "[lu'a fsnu'a fu'a]", but we have to decide where to put the binding. In the cases of "a'a" and "e'e", the placement is immediately outside the simple predicate in which the variables appear (repeated as often as needed). That would make your sentence "le zrce ju lo cbno [lu'a fsnu'a fu'a] blvu'ako klma'ake" with a case tag + object meaning "the situation in which that situation itself is later than now". I'm going to say that's a contradiction based on how *I* understand situational semantics. I would say any situation involving two non-identical situations has to be a proper "situational superset" of each, and nothing can be a proper superset of itself.
If we move "[lu'a fsnu'a fu'a]" to immediately after the (optional) illocutionary operator, then we have "[lu'a fsnu'a fu'a] le zrce ju lo cbno blvu'ako klma'ake". Again based on how I understand situational semantics, that is equivalent to "[lu'a fsnu'a] le zrce ju lo cbno [fu'a] blvu'ako [fu'a] klma'ake" which includes the same contradiction. The only way to make "u'a" work would be to make a special rule such that simple predicates containing "u'a" are somehow excluded from "fu'a" tagging. That would give us "[lu'a fsnu'a] le zrce ju lo cbno blvu'ako [fu'a] klma'ake" = "[Situation u'a,] the store, u'a being later than now, [in u'a] I am going to."
Strictly speaking, the "ju" adds little value to this sentence, because "lo cbno blvu'ako" forces the "simultaneous situation" introduced by "ju" to encompass both now and the time of "klma'ake", rather then just the latter which is probably what we want. No matter which technique you prefer, I think the right way of handling tense is via "je" or a binder, and keeping everything tense-related to the left i.e. outside the main predication which gets connected with "ju". I suppose that the exceptions would be large-scale situations in which it makes sense to mix tenses. One other point: If the x2 of "cbn" meaning "x1 happens during x2" defaults to now (I'm not certain about that), why can't the x2 of blv and prc also default to now?
le zrce je blvu'a klma'ake
= [lu'a fsnu'a] le zrce je blvu'a [fu'a] klma'ake
"The store, later, I am going to."
... where "je blvu'a" is an afterthought restriction. Without "u'a" we can say equivalently:
le zrce lu blvu fu klma'ake
With the hik- tense operator it's
le zrce hiku klma'ake
... which has the advantage (IMHO) of both being shorter and being definitionally in the future wrt discourse time.
You could also add more variables that refer to the moment of speaking
the sentence as well the location of the same (cf dei in Lojban), to get
shorter sentences, and alternatively just use shorter roots, e.g. cb for
cbn, bv for blv etc. If, say, e'i was the variable referring to lo jai
ca cusku be dei, it would get much shorter.
I like the idea of cb, bv, and pc (pr was already taken). Weirdly they share the right letters at their edges pc/cb/bv..
I am not flatly opposed to the sentence variables, but as seen above they need to be thought through carefully.
le zrce ju bvu'ake'i klma'ake
And I think context would let us elide that e'i most of the time anyway
so that:
le zrce ju bvu'a klma'ake
To the market, in the future, I will go.
Which is reasonably short and adds nothing new to the language.
I'm sorry if I overlooked something or oversimplified the problems at
hand. I'm just confused about some decisions.
There's nothing to be sorry about. The ideas are appreciated.