Re: A Language built around a novel grammar

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 13:59:58 +0100, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

>There are more special things, implemented by closed class morphemes:
>
>  - mark the beginning of a (sub)clause (lets mark this with BEGIN)
>  - mark an internally headed relative clause
>  - mark an externally headed relative clause
>
Yes, this is also something often missed by conlangers because
as far as I know, no natural language explicitly indicates
the extent of a subclause, other than by position (which is
only a partial solution) or semantic clues.

>
>> I found also that there seems to be no way to avoid some
>> distinct element that has special behavior quite apart from
>> the most generalized word class.
>
>Of course, some way the lexicon entries must be combined to larger
>semantical units.  However, there is the possibility of letting the
>language be ambiguous, i.e., you could make all operations implicit so
>that they must be inferred.  Classical Chinese comes close to this.
>It is basically an isolating language that consists only of content
>words.  Finding lexical word classes is not very easy.  Being no
>engelang, it is not entirely strictly ambiguous in all lexicon
>entries, so often you can find restrictions in usage of content words,
>but it is very, very interesting to analyse and see how much is left
>ambiguous in this *natlang*.
I have looked at Chinese and it is interesting, but there is a difference
between ambiguity and non-existence. The operators must exist (as
far as I can tell) and if one wants to be ambiguous about it, a Chinese
approach may be exactly what they are looking for. One of my goals,
however, was to reduce ambiguity, so I felt that I needed to show
the operators.

Harold