Re: NGL: Translation: 1 Corinthians 13

>
 Gerald Koenig
><jlk@...> wrote:
>
>>Stephen wrote:
>>>And what's interesting about this is that I think it means NGL has an
>>>_inherent_ verb system, simple, but complete with tenses beyond the
>>>generic. Consider these sentences, in order of descending level of
>>>explicitness:
>>>
>>>TOKCIR:      [7 sylables GLK]
>>>Mom tibeomnos danka. "I was going to school."
>>>
>>>ZUMIRTOK:    [7 sylables GLK]
>>>Mom ta tibeom danka. "I was going to school."
>
>Yup, that's what I get too. And cheerfully unrepentent about it, too
>:-). The {mom} was simply a rhetorical addition; since the verbal
>inflection already encodes that idea, I could have written (and would
>have written in a formal text, because me myself, I tend to avoid the
>use of superfluous pronouns in formal writing, not sure why) as:
>
>{Ta tibeom danka.} [six syllables]
This still won't parse for me. If "o" is "I" then the "m" looks like
"if" on Jack's cheat-sheet. Is tibo a permissible form for I go?
Is tibeo?
I also like to drop the pronouns and use the inflected forms as in Spanish.
I will say hablo rather than yo hablo for "I talk". That's why Vtense
keeps the option of using inflexions open. I see it as balancing the
information load off and on the verb. The tradeoff is loss of
language-independence. Pure Vtense is complete in and portable to
any language.

Similar to your use of the person affix, I can say in Vtense:
pa tibo danka. (5) or
pa tibeo danka (6), whichever is correct tokcir, or even
tibopa danka, (5)

but the meaning can only be "I went to school", because the distinct
progressive forms exist and must be used for if that is the meaning
wanted. No tense ambiguity is allowed. I take it that ta tibeom danka
can mean either I went or I was going, and that's a lot of semantic
difference unless you use more sylables to disambiguate the meaning.

>
>>>NGL GENERIC: [7 sylables GLK]
>>>Mom tibeom danka pa. "I was going to school." (Lit. I go school past)
>>
>>You forgot vtense:
>>
>>NILENGA: [5 or 6 syllable forms]
>>miam tibe danka.   "I was going to school." from Mi+pA; or, the same:
>
>I'm sure you said this somewhere already, but the repetition probably
>won't hurt: why is it {miam} rather than {mia}?
I do have a contraction set in the logographic post that includes
mi+am=mam. But I need to do an update of the pronouns in that post and
also an overall check for ambiguity in the contractions.So it could be:

mam tibe danka. (5). I was going to school.

You could say the contraction was lost due to an evolutionary force of
total neglect. Even I have never used it.

>
>>lum tibe danka.    "I was going to school" from LU+Me; or, logographic:
>>[@-*>]* tibe danka. pronounced lum tibe danka. or:
>
[I forgot the mi: mi lum tibe danka.]

>So these compounds {miam} and {lum} are synonymous; how does the tokor
>select which to use? Can there be a shade of difference in the
>meaning? (Perhaps you could use these redundant form to encode extra,
>non-temporal levels of meaning, like level of respect or formality?)
I am certain that they will acquire different connotations, and I feel
toward them as you said you do toward native peoples: they should be
left free and not overmanaged, to seek their fate. Self-determination
for grammar forms, if there is such a thing.

>
>>mi ti-*be danka. pronounced  mi tiambe danka. "I was going to school"
>
>Interesting, but this feature looks to me like it would be hard to
>learn to distinguish in text. Some times it's just as well to keep
>things simple.
This one is use tested and it works for eighth graders. It is a variant
of the pig-latin I learned as a schoolboy. You would be surprised how
our ears sort out the insertions of "ag" (pig latin) or am, etc. if they
are regularly put.

>
>>Visualize the ugly logograph as a single graceful glyph. It's coming
>>soon to our screens via unicode.
>
>Don't take this wrong, but as much as I love the Chinese language and
>the Chinese people, I despise the Chinese orthography and all its
>spiritual kindred. Well, maybe _despise_ is too strong a word, it is
>quite pretty and does make a fascinating and rich classical legacy for
>the Chinese people. It is also unwieldy and restricting. Excepting a
>very few things like numbers, I am a _big_ fan of phonetic
>representation. So however pretty it were made, I would be prejudiced
>against such a logographic system in NGL... but that's just me.
This type of logograph is phonetic representation, it's just that it
can be bigger than a syllable. We already have & and Q and seem to be
doing all right.  This is not a clone of chinese characters.  I would
want all logographs to have exactly one reading, like one thousand and
one=1001.

>
>>I read the TOKCIR version as past imperfect; o for past and s for
>>imperfect. At least that's what the cheat-sheet says. Past imperfect
>>would be I _went_ to school. "Was going" is past progressive. Jack,
>>is this correct use of your system?
>
>Ah, heck, I was close enough :-). Thanks for providing the VT example,
>which I was not confident enough to try and make myself.
Believe me, I will never criticize yours or anybody's use of VT or VS.
I will just celebrate that people besides me care.

>
>Taking an excursion into _my_ system for a moment, although PVS
>chooses to call the form {ta tibeom} a past imperfect, it is not quite
>so in the sense that _you_ mean. To give you an idea in terms of your
>system, {te} stabs an action somewhere in the middle of its vector
>(although this rule can be lax if {te} isn't explicitly marked
>punctual using {-me}). Without a displaced form, the time stabbed as
>the "verb's when" is the same as the time being talked about, and so
>"was going" makes the best translation, although "was going" and {ta
>tibe} don't really mean quite the same thing. PVS doesn't try to
>translate English exactly and doesn't care if it can... similarly, it
>doesn't care if English can translate *it* exactly.
My goal is to provide a sufficiently large set of visual tense
structures and accompanying tense particles to fully map the tense of
any language. We have different goals.

>
>If you see a {-an} form, by contrast, such as {tan tibe}, the {te},
>rather than stabbing a single vector, is enfolding a bunch of vectors,
>all of which happen to exist to the left of the mu in this case. So it
>means, sort of, "I went"... but only in a context such as "I went
>every day."
That is an iteration form in Vtense.

>
>My point quoted above was that if the vector tense morphemes {mu},
>{pa} and {fu} are core morphemes, they form a _de facto_ native NGL
>tense system, since an NGL speaker who knew only the generic would
>inevitably use these somehow if he had to disambiguate tense.
>
>Looked at this way (and this is not an attempt to recount history, but
>an attempt to create an interesting and maybe enlightening
>pseudo-history, if you like), all verb systems proposed are
>supplements (or, perhaps, _supplantants_) that modify or replace this
>system. Jack's system and my own mostly supplant it. Yours re-analyses
>it in terms of vectors, and regularises and expands it. This is what
>my imagination conjures, and I am charmed with the image. Of course
>this is just a pretty picture that depends entirely on what is
>essentially a phonetic coincidence that your vector morphemes were
>taken up as the core words for past, present and future, but I find it
>interesting nonetheless.
Perhaps there is only one tense system for us all, whatever we call
it.  You may recall that I said in the notes I sent you when you first
started in this project that I believed that Vtense was a visualization
for what ultimately may be non-visual phenomena, that the sense of time
is rooted in certain rhythmic biochemical processes, and that this is
the root of all intuitions about time. And of course I have made it
well known that I do believe Robin Allott's universal grammar, and so
the words we use, past (pa) present (with a t and e) and future (fu,
Julian first used it) are in some mysterious way connected to that
inherent rhythmicity which moves our hearts, our lungs, our thoughts,
and our dreams.

In the beginning was the word.

jerry
_______________
NGL is one.

>
>Yours,
>
>Stephen
>
>