Re: Rick Morneau's Katanda?

Jeffrey Henning <Jeffrey@...> wrote:

>"Mike S." <mcslason@...> comuni:
>
>> I have borrowed few ideas from Katanda myself for my logical
>> language.  The _Lexical Semantics_ is almost too good.  I've
>> had to think hard to come up with ideas to prevent my language
>> from being a Katanda-clone.  I can say that it's finally starting
>> to pull away, but I still can't shake his view on case roles,
>> as much as I've tried.
>
>Amen, brother! :-)  For anyone interested in engineered languages, it is
>*almost* too good.
>
>Do you realize _Lexical Semantics_ is nearly 95,000 words long?  It's an
>amazing magnum opus -- arguably the most impressive one-man achievement in
>modern conlanging.
:-)  It's an astounding document.  What's uncanny about it is that
it reads not so much as a description for a conlang as it does
an expert narrative on how natlangs really work at the semantic
level.

Anyway, the real reason I replied was to mention that I wrote
a program tailored especially to render Morneau's document into
html.  It works *great*; it even provides a TOC.  Check out
what it produces at:

http://www.emba.uvm.edu/~mslason/lexical_semantics.html

If anyone wants the prog (windows) it's for the taking.
You can have the source too (C++) but I'd prefer if you knew
how to compile it yourself. ;-)


>As I review it, I want to simplify it for my languages, which don't need
the
>semantic or morphological precision Rick Morneau needs to make his MT
>programming straight-forward.  Can someone point me to comparative grammars
>that reveal the most commonly used tenses, aspects, evidentials, etc.?  I'm
>looking for X:gramemes to match UPSID:phonemes.  (UPSID at
>http://www.linguistics.rdg.ac.uk/staff/Ron.Brasington/UPSID.interface/Inter
f
>ace.html )
Not sure where that info can be found, and btw that url did not work.


Regards

---   Mike

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