Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars

I've been thinking about this, and while at first I thought of these
RPN-ish grammars as dreadfully unnatural, they seem to be variations on
the following theme:

As symbols come in through your ears, you're sitting there building
conceptions.  You try to fuse the meanings of those symbols together as
they come in.  Sometimes a given meaning has several possible places
where other meanings could fit into it -- multivalent verbs are examples
of this.  That's where you need things like case marking, morphological
or syntactic.

It strikes me that natlangs are probably nothing more than examples of
this process, optimized according to parameters we don't understand to
maximize communicative value and ease of use.






>From: charles <catty@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
>Subject: Re: Hypersimple & Dreadfully Unnatural Grammars
>Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:07:12 -0800
>
>On Wed, 17 Mar 1999, Denis Moskowitz wrote:
>
>> Much of what has been discussed in this thread is reminiscent of what
>> I'm doing with Rikchik
("http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmm/rikchik/intro.html").
>> Rikchik words include a collector that says how many previous words
>> are popped off the stack, and each word includes a relation that
specifies
>> how it relates to the word that collects it.
>
>So a final verb would collect its adverb the same way it does
>its noun arguments, which is possible because each noun and
>adverb marks its own relation to its verb-collector, it seems.
>I did not see a statement that collectors must always follow
>their arguments, possibly because it is too obvious (?).
>Altogether, a very cool scheme for a workable RPN-like language.
>
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