Re: Telona grammar, part 1

Ahh, but you still have word-classes, Chris.   :-)

I don't know darned-all about math or logic, but IIRC, symbolic logic has
very few classes of terms.   That's probably why Telona comes across as a
loglang, even if that wasn't the original intention of Johnathan's design.

Suppose we had a language with entity markers and relationship markers as
the only word-classes.   Could that work?

Jim G.



(original message from Chris)

I'm not speaking for Jonathan, obviously, but I think loose answers to
these questions could be given. They may or may not satisfy you, but
conlanging is a personal art, after all. :)

For example, if a language had no copula, "apple" could be a verb meaning
"to be an apple". A previous conlang of mine, which never lasted long
enough to get a name, worked ("worked") like this:

IS-A-GRANNY-SMITH IS-AN-APPLE TASTES IS-GOOD
"The thing which granny-smiths, which apples, tastes good."

The basic plan was that everything is a predicate root, and complete ideas
were expressed as conjoined (or nested) simple predicates. Any non-simple
sentence would probably risk blowing the rather short stack of a human
mind, but oh well. This was my Lisp Era, as you can probably guess:

(taste (good (apple (granny-smith))))

I was young and impressionable...


As for the prepositions and conjunctions, they all can be seen (perhaps
tenuously) as aspects of "verbish" and "nounly" meanings:

to: arrive, go to, goal
in: presence, present
because of: cause, fault, result
and: join, conjunction, two, togetherness

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