Re: Another Sketch: Palno

> On 8/26/08, Logan Kearsley <chronosurfer@...> wrote:
>
>> Or after the third, leaving an incomplete sentence. You can't tell
>> without the commas. They are absolutely required. It would be nice to
>> have a way around that, but I haven't found one yet.
>
> How are the written commas represented in speech?
> Timing, stress, intonation...?  Some conlangs have
Timing, and intonation indicating breaks between clauses.
It's not something I've formalized yet, though I probably should.
It'll add another paragraph to my grammar....
Looking again at my example sentence "I like people who eat apples":

I pronounce "nen tcelokai, kotor pona :esat, agapit" with a prominent
dropping tone on "-kai", followed by a pause (can't be the end of a
clause 'cause it's incomplete, and followed by "kotor"), then another
prominent dropping tone on "-sat" followed by a pause (indicating that
this really is the end of a clause, not a predicate that will be used
as an argument for anything else), and a less pronounced dropping tone
on "-pit", again indicating that the clause is complete. I think I
don't make the dropping tone on the sentence-final syllable as
prominent because the end of a sentence is additionally marked by a
noticeably longer inter-sentence pause (or just stopping speaking
entirely).

> parenthetical or comma grammatical particles; parenthetical
> particles are better for disambiguating arbitrarily complex
> sentences, but I'm not sure they're natural enough for
> humans to learn to use them in realtime.
The elegance of a postfix system is that parenthetical markers are
unnecessary for perfect disambiguation (hence RPN arithmetic),
although the relative clause system I added breaks that a bit. I've
considered using parenthetical particles in a couple of other
languages, but I also think that they're not really practical for easy
real-time human comprehension. Is there any natural language that uses
them?

-l.