Re: Telona grammar, part 1

Jeff Jones wrote:

| What you're doing looks like it might be helpful to me (a couple of my
| languages don't distinguish parts of speech also, except for differences
| in argument structure and which tense/aspect is unmarked). I also like to
| work out the semantic underpinnings early on. It's encouraging to see
| someone else refer to sets of entities.
| The small closed class of operators reminds me of Sylvia's Kele'n, while
| the binary structure seems a bit like Henrik's Tyl-Sjok.
| I'd like to see more.

The encouragement is mutual!  I'm not much of a philosopher, nor a
syntactician (?) - books on syntax full of mathematical-looking formulae
turn me right off, and I only got about thirty pages into 'Word and Object'
... so when I talk about the principles of Telona I have to keep my fingers
crossed that I'm not using completely inappropriate and confusing terms.

You've reminded me that I must go back and look at Tyl-Sjok again - it's
high up on my list of 'conlangs that look interestingly like Telona', but I
haven't studied it properly yet.  As I understand it, though, Tyl-Sjok
expresses the hierarchy of levels in the syntactic structure in a rather
different way from Telona - watch my next post for details!  (It's one of my
favourite bits of Telona...)

Jonathan.
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
W. H. Auden, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'