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Wow, a surprising mention of Toaq Dzu! And by none less than And Rosta! And Rosta said:
The existence of Toaq Dzu, begun last year, had escaped my notice until this week.
This is a funny coincidence, because I'm currently working on a more complete description that goes into a lot more depth than the primer (for which I had only two weeks or so to write it).
It is a loglang created by Selpahi ('Amand,
Amatus'; Miles Forster). It is described at
<http://selpahi.de/ToaqAlphaPrimer.html> which isn't working for me
at the mo, but is also accessible as Google cache version:
<http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:7EdqV3RN9RIJ:http://selpahi.de/ToaqAlphaPrimer.html>.
You must have tried to access it exactly when my server moved. It's back up now.
It is a rationalization and decrappification/decruftification of Lojban rather than being more immediately based on predicate logic as, say, Xorban or Liva are. In its monosyllabicity and tonality it is reminiscent of Guaspi. Much of the key logic stuff is missing from the (short) primer.
Certainly. The primer is quite superficial. I can assure you that the logic itself is much more well-defined than it may appear from the primer.
I
can't find mention of how to do propositions that are arguments ("X
believe that Y"; "lo du'u") or how to show that something is an
argument of multiple predicates, or tricky stuff like wh-quantifiers
and comparatives. And the examples are not interlinearly glossed, so
it's hard to grock the details of the syntax.
Yeah, all those things are covered in my new book. I also have interlinears for all the examples.
(comparatives are just predicates: "x1 is more than x2 in property x2" or in compounds "x1 is more <whatever> than x2")
Words are monosyllabic, C(C)(w|y)V(V)(q) (q = [N]). It's unclear how to create new lexemes. (Maybe certain monosyllables are instead prefixes?). Toaq shares with Guaspi the elegant idea of having a word's lexical content signalled by its segmental form and its syntactic properties signalled by tone. Strikingly, there are 9 (!) tones (high/mid, rising, dipping, high-falling, peaking, low, creaky-falling, low-falling and neutral). I believe Selpahi capable of auditorily and articulatorily discriminating among these, for I have heard his very impressive pronunciation of Guaspi on Youtube, but few other humans could emulate him, I think. Since tone contributes to brevity, it is ergonomic, but I'm not sure what set of tone contrasts is optimally ergonomic. I feel sure that those nine are too many.
The new version has 8 tones (one of which isn't actually a tone, so it's actually 7). I find them easy enough to distinguish (in theory :P ). I agree that 9 was one too many, as the two low tones (one of which I deleted) were too easy to confuse. I also changed most of the tone-to-POS correspondences.
Livagian once had 5 (rise, fall, level, rise-fall, fall-rise) back in the 80s, and since then it has gradually reduced to just a binary phonological contrast between level and nonlevel tone. The primer says Toaq "is relatively succinct; the average Toaq Sentence is about as long as an English one, though there are many cases where it's noticeably shorter than English. And compared to Lojban, Toaq needs slightly over 50% fewer syllables to express the same things." While this is true, and succinctness is an ergonomic asset, multiplicity of phonological contrasts, especially beyond a certain threshold, is an ergonomic detriment, so the ergonomic loglang will have to strike a balance here. Certainly buying succinctness at the cost of inflating the number of contrasts requires no great ingenuity; one could easily define a language with a thousand phonemes, but not an ergonomic one.
I guess so. I don't think Toaq Dzu goes too far though. It's not much different from tonal natural languages. Maybe it's slightly less robust, but on the other hand a Toaq Dzu sentence pronounced with all the wrong tones still contains the same lexical information, unlike Mandarin for instance.
I have a short text in the new book, a translation of a fairytale, and it turns out that the Toaq Dzu version is considerably shorter than the English, but I don't think that it achieves that by artificial means. It's mostly a side-effect of the tones, which save a load of function words. Root words are monosyllabic, but compounds can be as long as you like.
I hope to be able to finish the new book (as well as the new version of the language proper) soon. Creating a full set of root words is what's taking the longest. I'm considering publishing the book without the dictionary, but I thought it would be more impressive to present a "complete" language that has both a grammar and a pretty good lexicon.
Thank you for you comments And; your opinion means a lot to me. --selpahi