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Am 16.10.2012 04:34, schrieb Mike S.:
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].
I will look at this more carefully later when I have more time.
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.
I didn't mean "cheating" in a derogatory sense, but rather that it seemed like making a concession. However, it might just be the case that Xorban will end up tending towards smaller sentence that share variables, rather than one huge sentence that nobody can process. Different languages do things differently, so I'll be more open-minded from now on.
It might be worthwhile to do one sentence a day on this translation.
Yeah, I think so too. Translating a text is the fastest way to find places that need work in a language, but it's also good practice.
> 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.
Hm, true. I think I found it weird to sign a message with "co" if it's setting the topic, but *at the end* of the mail.
> 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?
I just meant something like pe bbba ccca = la bbba le ccce psake
> 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.
I wouldn't care too much about similarity to Lojban's numbers. Just pick ten relatively different clusters that are pronouncable onset-clusters. If ks/ts is too tight, one could for instance make on of them voiced, gz or dz. I'm sure there is a set of ten CCs that satisfies both your and my wishes. It seems only "nl" and "pv" are problematic now. Also possibly "xt", but there I at least like the sound, and it can be pronounced together.
> 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.
I see, that's fine then. co q selpa'i 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 .