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Am 07.10.2012 22:16, schrieb And Rosta:
I also think the roots could be shorter such that every word/root is monosyllabic.Do you mean things like "mpl", where the schwas are easily elidable? Or do you mean that there should be a morphology/phonology that guarantees monosyllabic roots?
The latter. I think it would be better to have short (monosyllabic) roots if the goal is to have short sentences. I know there aren't enough appropriate consonant clusters to make *every* root monosyllabic, but the most common ones should be.
Roots that have only two consonants are automatically monosyllabic, e.g. _lk_ [l@k]. Some of these will even stay monosyllabic after a vowel of the desinence is added, e.g. _pr_ -> _pra_ stays very short. Such roots are very valuable and should be given to the most useful words (probabably things that are handled via TAGs in Lojban (tenses etc) and some additional words that are specifically needed in Xorban.
But that's up to you (pl) to decide.Not "up to *us* to decide"? You don't want a hand in it? I think you should make criticisms and suggestions.
Well yes, I just didn't feel like I'm on par with you people and in a way it's your language, your dream of a real loglang. I can surely try to help and give input, but I respect your vision of this project, if that makes sense.
What are Guaspi's root definitions like? Is there anything from Guaspi that's you'd recommend to Xorban?
Lojban: x1 knows that x2 (du'u) is true about x3 [...] Gua\spi: x1 knows that x2 is x3:+2.Gua\spi has these sort of ka-like/jai'd place structures. The x2 is forced to appear in the x3, it's automatically filled in, which prevents nonsense like "I know about tables that I like hamburgers."
Also, it has some gismu that Lojban just lacks, like: x1 learns to do skill x2:+1 from teacher x3 where Lojban has to make do with a lujvo like crebi'o.I'd like for Xorban's gimste to have no holes at all. Just throw in everything that people have always wanted (that is, don't just copy the lojban gimste).
Gua\spi basically has only one abstractor (plus one for direct speech), and so far it seems Xorban also only has one. It seems to be enough.
Ah I remember now, one thing I didn't like was how you (pl) decided to implement compounds in Xorban. Having no regularity in them and only using the roots for mnemonic purposes seemed like a cheap solution, and less compositional than I would prefer.It was me who was most insistent about this. If there's a way to create fully compositional compounds, why would we not just count this as syntax? For Xorban, compounds by their very nature are noncompositional -- a mnemonic way of creating new stems.
True, it would be syntax. However, if there is a chance to get a fully compositional compounding system, then why not try? It would reduce the dictionary size drastically. It's just like the regular lujvo that exist, that I won't bother to enter into jbovlaste because they are regular, their meaning is apparent if the rafsi are known. Unfortunately, Lojban can't be fully regular in its lujvo, but Gua\spi gets much further, and I think Xorban could at least try.
If the definitions of the roots were adjusted slightly, a compound system akin to the one used in gua\spi would be much more to my liking, and feels more logical to me.Tell us more -- the kind of system you'd like, and why.
I need to think about it. Xorban's syntax presents a new situation for me. The predicate coming last might make this difficult. If I come up with something useful, I'll share it.
Yes, and brevity is avoided by means of throwing away information -- mainly by having an implicit "zo'e" instead of "su'o da xi mu".
What exactly is "su'o da xi mu" supposed to mean? Filling five places with da? With zo'e? At least one thing_5 ? ua nai This brings up a question I've wanted to ask for a while. Do Xorban predicates have no implicit zo'e in them? If you have, say, klm (klama), and you say klma'a, is this equivalent to klama zi'o zi'o zi'o zi'o?
Sure, it allows you to say nonsense. It's not a grammar in the classical linguistics sense. But at the same time, that's what makes Lojban a nice experiment. Somethings might turn out to make sense in the future that now seem nonsensical. I take it you would prefer things that make no sense to be ungrammatical.Not really. The grammar generates a set of sentences. A sentence is a pairing of a phonological form, interpreted phonetically, with a syntactic form, interpreted semantically. The Lojban pseudogrammar generates structured phonological forms, not sentences. I'll say more about this in another message.
Okay, I'll wait for it then. It's still not entirely clear to me what you mean.
Isn't that possible in only two ways? Have more selma'o or write a semantic parser. The former is not desirable I think, the latter just hasn't been done yet.If by "semantic parser" you mean the rules that convert phonological forms into semantically interpretable logical forms, then yes, those are the rules that would make the grammar complete; but those rules haven't been agreed on, let alone codified, and they're really the core of the language.
I don't think that's the fault of Lojban, but the fault of its speakers. It's up to them to discover these rules, which to me, already exist buried somewhere, and only need to be found. I'm sure that if some people that are reasonably fluent in the language and understand its intricacies would work on this, then surely, progress would be made fast. Add a good programmer to the mix and voilà.
it has no coherent, comprehensive and codified rules for defining correspondences between phonological forms and logical forms,I'm not sure what this business about phonological forms is about. Would you mind giving an example?The phonological form /su'o da broda/ corresponds to the logical form "Ex broda(x)". A phonological form is pronounceable.
Hmm. Okay.
Wow. I do see a cultural shift among Lojbanists -- am not infrequently astonished by it indeed; but I still see plenty of conservatives who don't want to unlearn or discard anything they already know.
Yes, many conservatives are still around. It's sad.
Surely it's far easier and quicker to start again, e.g. with Xorban,than to go through a painful process of rebuilding Lojban?
That depends a lot. For me, the answer is no. I really like Lojban. Xorban is quite different in some aspects that I would miss. Lojban still has a naturalisic enough feel to it to be considered a human language. It works well for poetry, it has nice rhymes, it has vowels in its stems :) I don't know how Xorban is going to do poetry at all. And that's fine, Xorban's goals might be different; for example to be a loglang above anything else, and maybe to be a potential auxlang. It's hard for a language to serve everyone's ideals. I just wouldn't want to replace Lojban with anything. Fixing the "few" remaining problems in Lojban is the way to go for me, even if my approach to that is a bit drastic. I'm ready to completely ignore what the authorities say if their decisions would prohibit useful things. If this gets me shunned, so what? The conservatives are welcome to cling to their mess, people will follow me, who is really just to a large degree following what xorxes started. So the odds are on our side!
Unfortunately, I wasn't around to see the beginnings of Xorban, so I don't even know the motivation behind the current system, in particular the formula + variable idea. It seems a lot like FA tags to me, and the rest is just a simplified Lojban (I'm oversimplifying her). But maybe what I call Lojban is not exactly what you have in mind when you criticize it.I see cosmetic similarities to Lojban, because it was Jorge who came up with the "skin" (the look and feel) and he evidently has a fondness for Lojban.
I hope so. I'd be sad if he left us. (Btw, xorxes, are you going to translate Through the Looking Glass? :P You did the first one, now only you can translate the second one or it wouldn't be the same styles in each book. Maybe we could do it together?)
probably lots of us who have thought about loglangs over the years have independently converged on something pretty close to Xorban. (That doesn't mean we all think it's optimal. I think it's not ergonomic enough, but compared to my more ergonomic alternative, Xorban is far more suitable to being understood and learnt easily, so is arguably more suited to being an auxlangy loglang.)
Is your ergonomic Xorban version documented anywhere? I'd like to know what the differences are.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i -- pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo doị mèlbi mlenì'u .i do càtlu ki'u ma fe la xàmpre ŭu .i do tìnsa càrmi gi'e sìrji se tàrmi .i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku .