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Re: Unambiguous languages (was: EU allumettes)

From:Mark P. Line <mark@...>
Date:Friday, May 7, 2004, 22:21
And Rosta said:
> What you describe matches my recollections. The CY design is very > coherent & conceptually spare, but since it is intrinsically > incapable of expressing any distiction of meaning that cannot be > expressed lexically or morphosyntactically, it would *for me* not > be a candidate for the holy grail of engelangs... A random example > of a distinction hard to capture lexically: > > "Three men longed to fabricate idols in honour of two goddesses" > Reading 1. 3 men, 2 goddesses. > Reading 2. 3 men, 2-6 goddesses. > Reading 3. 2 goddesses, 3-6 men.
Okay, I'm not understanding the parameters of the problem you're posing. Could you spell out for us the three readings you think this English sentence has? We need to get some agreement on what readings there are before I can think about how the different readings would be expressed in CY. (And if this is about numbers, don't forget to include different readings for different numbers of _idols_ as well.) One thing bears mentioning already, though: a CY noun (and the noun group it heads) can be definite (entails that its referent is identifiable by the hearer), indefinite (entails that its referent is not identifiable by the hearer) or unspecified (entails nothing about the identifiability of its referent, i.e. the utterance remains vague on this point). This scheme doesn't necessarily match up very well with the use of definiteness/indefiniteness marking in natlangs, so noun groups like "three men" or "idols" or "two goddesses" might be expressed in CY as definite, indefinite or unspecified. A finite clause with three noun groups might be expressed in CY as any combination for a total of 3x3x3=27 possible translations (although some of them are probably not reasonable translations of the English example). I think there's more going on (such as scope ambiguity) in your example sentence than just definiteness ambiguity, though, but I'll wait until you've had a chance to spell out the readings you're seeing before I get into that. By the time we've combined the scope ambiguity with the definiteness ambiguity already mentioned, there may be *hundreds* of possible translations of this sentence into CY. I doubt that I'd have the time to construct all of them, but it should suffice if I can at least explain how they would be derived. -- Mark Polymathix San Antonio, TX