Re: ANNOUNCE: My new conlang S11

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 10:32:57 -0800, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> I've not looked at Lojban in detail, but from what I understand, it
> quite resembles many programming languages in the sense that functions
> (verbs) have a fixed number of arguments that are expected to be
> passed in a fixed order.
Kind of, though all arguments are optional and you can change the
order if you explicitly mark this -- either on the function (there are
"reordering" prefixes -- part of speech "SE" -- that turn f(a, b, c)
into, for example, f'(b, a, c), so the first argument to f' is the
same as the second argument to f, i.e. f(aap, noot, mies) means the
same as f'(noot, aap, mies)) or on the arguments (there are
"positional" prefixes -- part of speech "FA" -- that say, for example,
"this is the third argument" so you could call, say, f(3=foo) which
fills the third argument with "foo" and leaves the first and second
ones unspecified, or f(2=bar, baz, qux) which makes "bar" the second
argument and "baz" and "qux" the first and third (since they are not
explicitly numbered, they fill up the unused arguments), or, if you
really wanted, you could be explicit about all places by saying
f(1=bla, 2=ble, 3=bli)).

The first argument looks most like a subject, but even that is
optional; missing places are filled in with {zo'e}, which you can also
explicitly mention if you wanted; it's glossed as "unspecified it" and
merely indicates that that place isn't filled, so no particular
mention is made of that particular place (e.g. {mi dunda le cukta} =
{mi dunda le cukta zo'e} = "I give the book to unspecified-it", so
there is a recipient [this is part of the definition of {dunda}] but
we're not making any particular claim about them).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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