I assume knowledge of Lojban for these conlang posts, so they'll probably not make sense to non-Lojbanists. But for the rest of you, you'll be glad to know that I'll be using Lojban vocabulary in the examples as much as possible. That's partially because I haven't made any vocabulary, but we'll ignore that detail.
Lojban and my unnamed language have a pretty noticeable difference. I essentially throw out the concept of hierarchical bridi structure in favour of arbitrary relationships between a set of predicates. An example is in order. In Lojban, you may say {lo gerku cu plipe}, for which ilmentufa gives:
Notice that {plipe} takes the primary spot as the main selbri, and {gerku} is contained within {plipe}'s realised place structure. Alternatively, we can say {lo plipe cu gerku}, which differs only in emphasis:
I propose that a better model of the interaction here is to allow both of them to be sentence-level selbri, and then link their place structures. Using the text 〈gerku fa fa plipe〉 in this new language, we get something that looks like this:
(Bow down to my HTML skills ;-)!) This still requires some explanation. In a tag cluster (see diagram), the first tag, by default, points to the preceding selbri. The rest point to following selbri in order. So here, the first 〈fa〉 extracts 〈gerku〉's x1, and the second 〈fa〉 extracts 〈plipe〉's x1. All tags within a tag cluster have their referents equated. The default quantification rules tell us that {su'o gerku cu du su'o plipe}, or alternatively {su'o da zo'u da gerku je cu plipe}. The second translation, though the more Lojbanic one, ends up losing quantifier information in more complex examples.
By the way, you may be wondering why I chose 〈gerku fafa plipe〉. It comes from an English pun I invented to make you remember the ideas here: “Is the dog jumping or the jumper dogging?”. Ah, discrepancies between noun and verb forms...
No comments:
Post a Comment