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Re: [engelang] reformulating the core grammar



My point (sorry my tremor starting acting up there) was that, if you take the BNF presented as representing anything in the way of grammar, as opposed to phonological strings, then the grammar looks very complex, because it has many irrelevant bits in it and so far lacks many crucial bits.  If you ignore all the phonological stuff (as we should since we officially have no idea what Xorban phonology is like), then it is possible to give a fairly simple grammatical description -- not much worse than what I offered, plus some version of sentence fusions (also -- depending on format -- fairly simple).  I think that the discussion has been retarded quite a bit by not making clear what was going on, especially in presenting as a grammar a phonological string generator only.



From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, October 8, 2012 6:47 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] reformulating the core grammar

 
John E. Clifford, On 09/10/2012 00:05:
> I found it helpful when I discovered that this ."co re g rammer" was,
> in fact only a phoneme strin generator, barely anuy connection with
> syntax at al (hence the lack of quantifiers, for example). So, VkV is
> joust a string of phonemes, not arguments to predicates or functions.
> This confusion of levels seems to lie at the heart oof ,much of
> should be a fairly simple grammar.

That last sentence got a bit garbled. Are you saying that because the BNF rules are a phoneme string generator (which indeed seems to be the case), the grammar overall is going to be fairly simple? My take on it is that the rules generating the grammar we understand the language to have are very simple -- I've spelt them out across two or three messages, a small handful of rules -- but that the phoneme string generator belongs in the bin (except as a kind of ad hoc notation for people who find it useful).

--And.