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A very thorough response! Am 16.10.2012 00:54, schrieb Mike S.:
la je cmla nltra
Nxu'a la'a mslfa'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le je bnle pxre li je ckti
mi je clca rcfa leki pseki vska'ake.
Original:
"Once when I was six years old I saw a magnificent picture in a book,
called True Stories from Nature, about the primeval forest."
Yeah, except the book is really just called "Experienced Stories" in the original French. Now I notice I forgot to translate that part!
This is a tricky first sentence! The noun phrase headed by "book" adds most of the complexity, so let's simplify that to just "book" and see what we get. Hu'a. So pvo fo la'a mba'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le (je li ckti pseki) (je bnle) pxre vska'ake. P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a (book-pertaining) (grand) picture I see. That's not very complex so far. In general, the more SOV-leaning a language, the greater the tendency of relative clauses and prepositional phrases to precede the modified term.
Yes, that is true.
Xorban is pretty SOV-leaning, so (IMHO) most naturally, we want to put the book's prepositional phrase before the picture. Note that I have parenthesized the modifiers of pxre. In Xorban, adjectives, prepositional phrases and relative clauses are all basically the same thing except for their internal complexity. They are just formulas preceded by "je". Here's the stuff (I think) we left out as wff, followed by different options for integrating them: mi je li clci psaki je jtna lsra = "(i) is called <nature-pertaining true stories>" la je prmvla rcfla psika = "(i) is about the primeval forest" 1. The most straightforward approach is to just slap these in with "je": Hu'a. So pvo fo la'a mba'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le je li (je mi je li clci psaki je jtna lsra) (je la je prmvla rcfla psika) ckti pseki je bnle pxre vska'ake. P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a (called <nature-pertaining true stories>) (primeval forest pertaining) book-pertaining grand picture I see. 2. That does seem complex. Maybe we want to try a non restrictive clause approach (via parentheticals). We can accomplish that simply by just dropping the "je".
I considered parentheticals, but they felt out of place.
Hu'a. So pvo fo la'a mba'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le je li (mi je li clci psaki je jtna lsra) (la je prmvla rcfla psika) ckti pseki je bnle pxre vska'ake. P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a -- it was called <nature-pertaining true stories> and was about primeval forest -- book-pertaining grand picture I see.
But doesn't a parenthetical need an illocutionary operator?
3. That's still heavy. We might as well move the parentheticals past the main verb and let the implicit binding rule do its thing. Hu'a. So pvo fo la'a mba'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, le je li ckti pseki je bnle pxre vska'ake; mi je li clci psaki je jtna lsra; la je prmvla rcfla psika. P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a book-pertaining grand picture I see; it[book] was called <nature-pertaining true stories>; it was about the primeval forest.
Yeah, but I avoided splitting the sentences, because it feels a bit like cheating.
4. I am a little iffy about implicitly binding "i", which is my preferred local throwaway variable, especially when the old binding is deeply nested. Maybe we should move out "book" to the same level as the picture in the main clause, and give it a discourse topic variable. That would give us: Hu'a. So pvo fo la'a mba'a ji'a la nnca ska'aka, la'i ckta'i le je pseka'i je bnle pxre vska'ake; ma'i je li clci psaki je jtna lsra; la je prmvla rcfla psa'ika. P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a certain book, the of-it grand picture I see; it[book] was called <nature-pertaining true stories>; it[book] was about the primeval forest. That would be my final version (in this stage of my understanding).
Thank you for trying this sentence! I see it's still much longer than the English... I foresee some trimming in the future :)
Maybe we could also assign "e'i" to "pxr" to make that a little more salient. You can keep reusing these variable in the story, rebinding them every so often.
Useful in theory, we'll have to see if this sees more use than Lojban's ko'V series, which are very rarely seen in literature. Though, since Xorban assigns things automatically (doesn't need an extra goi for that) this idea becomes less awkward and provides a clear way for anaphora.
As you can see it's complicated, but there are actually tons of
options. I think we just have to use the language's strengths to our
advantage, ignore English's structure, and see what we can do.
Annotations:
nx- x1 is the first sentence of paragraph x2 (I'm a big fan of this
word, please like it!)
cjf- x1 is the current/this sentence
Since "nx" (I think) would nearly always be used as "nxu'a", I have to
say that it seems a little wasteful to set aside a whole CC stem for
this. What I think we need is a word for "paragraph". Then we can form
the sentence "This very sentence begins a paragraph". Then we assign a
particle as a shortcut for that sentence, perhaps "wu'a". I am not sure
how Jorge and others feel about using interjections in this way, so I
will add experimental "hu'a" to the list. Does that work for your
purposes?
Well that would work too. I didn't think of using an interjection for this purpose, but it seems to be the right part of speech. I was just looking for an elegant way of saying Lojban "ni'o" :). I thought my solution was nice, but your solution is good, too (though I fell in love with the sound of nxu'a :P ).
The variable "u'a" shall henceforth be defined as being bound by "la
cjfa". The old meaning of u'a now seems much less useful than I
originally thought, so I would like to change it. If the old meaning
does have uses some day, another variable can be assigned to it.
I'll be using "u'a" for "la cjfa" from now on.
I have no problem with that. I really don't think that we need more
than five generic V at this point, and ten would be plenty for certain,
so at least a few others can be assigned implicit restrictions. (Maybe
we should revive Jorge's idea of "e'u" from "prenu" to mean "le'u pre'u"
i.e. "someone", which can be useful at times.)
I think that's useful.
mslf: I'd like to use a CC for this, my suggestion has been "mb-".
The point of this is that sometimes one would like to explicitly say
"Me", and la'a mslfa'a is quite long. However, since la'a mba'a is
still quite long, what I'd like the most is a unary operator that
stands for la'a mslfa'a/mba'a and is at most two syllables long:
Ca'a. That would make it easier to use "I/me" in a topic-comment
sort of way.
I agree that "la'a mslfa'a" (6 syl.) is a mouthful, so I have already
added "mb" (a mere cluster) as a possible shortening of "mslf". Keep in
mind that "a'a" is fully grammaticized in Xorban, so you will never have
to say "la'a mba'a" (4 syl.) except to add emphasis. As far as
topic-comment, we already have the versatile particle "co" which
together with mb can keep things down to three syllables, which is as
short as English:
co mba'a klma'a "As for me, I'm going".
Oh, I did not realize co was also for marking the topic. Okay then, that solves that problem too. Of course now co is much vaguer than I thought, but oh well, if it should become a problem, we can just add more illocutionary operators.
I left out "once", because I'm not sure how to say it. Maybe
rf- x1 happens x2 times
would be a good way, maybe not. Probably there will be binary
operators for the members of Lojban's ROI selma'o, but I don't know
how it will work.
Most likely we'd want to quantify over events e.g. "so nmpo fo smo'e."
Some one thing was an event in which something was something = once,
something happened. It's hard to imagine how to shorten that at the
moment, so hopefully that works for the present time.
Seems to work for now, except numbers still feel a bit awkward to me. La fa vska'ake'e dva. I saw you twice. Or La dva fa vska'ake'e Two things A such that A is an event of me seeing you.I guess that's not so bad, especially if the numbers all get such a nice stem.
Using ps- for pe is very annoying. There should be a different way.
I'm not sure if leki pseki works.
That works fine. It means "Some A & E pertaining to each other are such
that ...". Usually one would say something like "la je psa'ake mlte"
meaning "my cat ...".
Right, but maybe it would be good to have a binary operator that stands for "je psVkV". Why not use "pe" for that?
Questions:
1. Would anybody be opposed to allowing the buffer vowel to have
some more allophones? I'm mainly thinking of [I] and [U].
I think that <i> & <u> need lax or near-open allophones to facilitate
<yi> and <wu>, and that a lot of people would mix up [I] and [i] even if
that weren't the case. So I would say that buffer vowel has to be
either the schwa, or the mid or mid-open rounded front vowel like French
neuf. Another option I think would be the close central vowel found in
Russian sometimes written [1].
Okay. That makes sense.
2. Would it be possible to either give every digit a C-stem that
follows the nm- or even better, give every digit its own CC root
without any nm-? Right now, seven of them are CC, while three are C.
Seems like an annoying randomness. I experimentally used pure CC
stems in this text (sk- for six).
That's my fault, but it was not random. I was thinking of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law I would consider "nl, pv,
dv" optional CC variants for 0, 1, 2. The problem with C roots is that
the low amount of redundancy given that we have no vowel differences
among roots.
My dream is for each of the digits to have a CC stem such that it forms a regular onset cluster, e.g. kr,pr,bl,ts,dv,ks, etc. Things that don't need a schwa-insertion ever.
3. Is ' really irreversibly [?] now? It makes me a bit sad...
That's And's preference, but I think that <'> remains [h\] and that <q>
is [?]. However, it would not harm anything to allow <q> to be written
<"> I think, which might be a little easier on the eyes.
I would be happy with <'> = [h] and <q> = [?]. However, don't we have two letters that are [h] then (<'> and <h>) ?.
All that said, I think I'm starting to like Xorban, if it becomes
more usable.
Yes we have to make it simpler, but we still have to study it too.
True true. It's still early. co q selpahi qa'a -- 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 .