Re: [engelang] Xorban: la je cmla nltra - engelang messages

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 7:58 PM, selpa'i <seladwa@hidden.email> wrote:

> 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?

Yes, every non-interjection parenthetical does. That was a mistake.

> 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.

5. Another thing we could use is the "afterthought restrictions" that you caused to come to my attention:

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 (je ma'i je li clci psaki je jtna lsra) (je la je prmvla rcfla psa'ika) vska'ake.
P. Once (I) the myself, when I was a six year-laster, a certain book, the of-it grand picture; it[book] being called <nature-pertaining true stories>, it[book] being about the primeval forest, I see [the picture].

That makes things a little less nested and keeps everything one happy sentence, main verb Xorbanically at the end. An afterthought restriction is essentially something pulled from a restriction and converted into a modifier of the predication. It usually doesn't change logical form so long as it doesn't enter the scope of a ju-modifer. So heavy constituents can be broken up this way thanks to "variable-concord". There is one other thing we could do, involving an after tree, but that would move us far from the original text so I'll leave that out for now. I don't want to be considered a cheater so consider this my new final version. It might be worthwhile to do one sentence a day on this translation.

> 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 :)

We need to get everything that we need to say sayable and with clear logical form. Then, yeah, lots of trimming and optimizing can ensue.

> 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.

Yes.

> 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.

Oddly, it turns out that it's hard to identify a real difference between a vocative and topic switching to the second person entity:

co ptfe'e, ca'i xe sme jnve'eke
Father, what do you think? (vocative)
= As far as you father, what do you think? (topic)

If there turns out to be a real difference in some cases, I have "co'o" (top.) and "co'e" (voc.) allocated in the back of my mind.

> 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?

I am not sure what you have in mind here. you mean like pVkV?

> 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.

Leaving aside the Japanese, we almost have that now:

n(l) p(v) d(v) tr cf gl sk zb xt vm

The main idea was redundancy; the Lojban number rafsi are totally awful in Xorban e.g. pv (1) vs. bv (8). Likewise I think that ks versus ts is a bit tight.

> 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>) ?.

I am guessing that <h> is not going to be a real letter in the final cut, so I am I am using it to compile hypothetical operators which will be assigned z- or something else. I have been pronouncing <h> as [T] (not a phone I want in the final language!), but anything else is fine too.