Re: A Language built around a novel grammar

On Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:49:24 +0100, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

>Hi!
>
>Harold Ensle writes:
>>...
>> I understand why you do not distinguish them, but I think that as such
>> that a verb includes the operator, it can be morphosyntactically
>> differenciated.
>>...
>
>Ah!  Yes, I see what you are doing.  So are your operators an open
>word class?  Because when I match your statement with Qþyn|gài
>grammar, your operators are essentially the cases, which are a closed
>category in Q..
The operators are a closed class. The idea was to represent a (fairly)
minimal set of simple relations that would make the language work.
(And the choice was motivated in part by what is treated "fundamentally"
in natural languages....such as case and pre/post position
and conjunction.)

>
>Then in my unfinished S11, I wanted to get rid of the closed category
>of cases and have an open one instead, because it felt a bit arbitrary
>what to express in cases and what not.  So I started with two open
>categories, that could be labelled verb (the equivalent to cases) and
>nouns.
>
>After a while of constructing, I *still* arrived at the point where I
>joined the two open word classes.  Again, I found no way to
>distinguish them in a good way.
If I understand your meaning here......if one used the word for an
operator, like "equals" for "=" and then treated it like any other
word, then the operator would become part of the general lexicon.
So your point is, why should some word get special treatment?

>The result is that any lexicon entry
>may function as either nullary (a 'noun') or unary (equivalent of
>intransitive verb or case or adposition).  Binary (equiv. of
>transitive verb) n-ary relations in general are expressed by serial
>verb construction of 'verbal'-'nomimal' compounds.
I see here that you have minimized the operators completely(?),
but notice that in the very end, you still had to have three.

I found also that there seems to be no way to avoid some
distinct element that has special behavior quite apart from
the most generalized word class.

Harold

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