Re: Tense and Aspect (was Re: Wow!...) Rob Zook Fri, 05 Dec 1997 18:34:19 -0600 At 04:14 PM 12/5/97 -0600, Saul wrote: >From: Rob Zook >Date: Friday, December 05, 1997 2:49 PM >natural possibility. (After he's thought about it, Rob will decide that >it's not logical enough, and we can reform it for Certain Mode. ;-,) Well, I did not think it "complete" enough. It seems logical enough if we can flesh it out more. >What I'd like to do, though, is devise some kind of auxiliary system for >indicating aspect or mood when using infixes that aren't marked for >them. And something like those deixis-modeled particles would serve very >well. I'll need to contemplate the situation a bit before I make any >concrete suggestions, and frankly I'd like to get the lexical generator >going first. Well, the only thing we need is confirmation on a few things. I'll post some more on this a little later though. >>I'm not so happy with this translation anymore. So I would modify it to: >> >>s'at cta va'num ongo s'kalv,djuna s'deelu >> > >What about > > va'numka cta'ehi; kalvnama s'at deeluha > > find-! fact-PLUR; distort-PERM thou-GEN pleasure-DAT Well, I don't know if Twain was speaking in an imperative mode. I forgot about the plural affix. What does the -ma "PERM" affix do? I'm also not sure I understand how the Dative affix affects the meaning either. This is making me wish I picked Latin in high school instead of German ;-) >> I also invented a new >>conjunctive which allows one to join sentances in the same manner as >>"and" in English. > >We need such things. In certain mode, though, would it make sense to >surround clauses with parentheses particles and then attach -ong to both >"expressions?" Well, with clauses perhaps. The original quote was: "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." I was seeing "Get your facts first" as a complete sentance in conjunction with future tense "distort them as you please", also a complete sentance. I can see how parenthetical particles could aid inside a statement/sentance. But I think we need articals to connect sentances together. In Lojban: pamai cpacu do datni ,ije ba galfi go'a sepu'a ,i "Firstly get you facts (and-sentance) after distort (previous object) pleasingly." I have been thinking about how to do precise logical expressions, so I have been examining the only truly logical language humans have created - Lojban. Technically Loglan is also a true logical language but the creator of Loglan is so copyright paranoid getting ahold of the materials to learn Loglan costs money. Whereas, all the main teaching documents for learning Lojban are free on-line: http://xiron,pc,helsinki,fi/lojban/lojban,html Anyway, I think we should force an large logical expression into a connected series of statments with sub-clauses. With a set of logical connectives for sentences/statments and another set for the clauses. Parenthesis will work fine inside a singles statement, but I think they would seem confusing across several statements. ((X-AND Y-AND)-OR Z-OR) AND (H-OR J-OR I-OR) seems more clear to me than (((X-AND Y-AND)-OR Z-OR)-AND (H-OR J-OR I-OR)-AND) Of course, I'm not totally hooked on this, nor do I recommend we simply adopt Lojban grammer. However, I have yet to see a language as rich in logical particles as Lojban (funny that ;-), so it makes a good model to adapt to our purposes. Rob Z.