Re: Communal/collaborative languages now possible at CALS

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 6:33 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
> Jim Henry:
> <<
> I could sort of squeeze that into "question particle"
> but "ala" is a general negative particle, not primarily
> used for questions, or I could call it "interrogative
> word order" but the WALS examples involve
> fronting the verb.  This doesn't seem to be the
> same thing.
>>>
>
> I would call that interrogative word order, of the
> options presented.
>
> Whenever I'm not sure what to put I always go
> to the WALS page for an explanation.  Remember
In this case the WALS page didn't help; the interrogative
word order examples didn't resemble the Toki Pona form
much more than the question particle examples... I'll go ahead
and mark it as "interrogative word order" though.


On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:

> Mandarin has both:
>
>    hao3 bu  hao3?
>    good not good
>    (Is it) good/ok?
>
>    hao3 ma?
>    good YN
>    (Is it) good/ok?
So both question particle (unambiguously) and (maybe,
in David's analysis) interrogative word order -- as
English has both intonation and word order as question-marking
options.  I suppose the people doing the WALS entry for
Mandarin maybe found that the "ma" form occurred more
often in their corpus, or something.


On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 5:07 AM, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin-conlang@...> wrote:

> Ah, but the *result of the search* isn't sortable. For instance
> searching for anything Jim Henry might have sent to me within so and so
> a timespan, then sort on dates, or for conlang, sort on subjects (though
> that was more of a necessity in the old days where subject lines were
> truncated and slightly changed east and west...). I have no idea just
> what criteria they use to order the results. Structured data like the
> meta-data of an email shouldn't be treated as unstructured data like
> text.
As far as I can tell, Gmail normally sorts search result threads by
the date of the most recent message in the thread.   I agree it would
occasionally be nice to be able to sort by some field other than
last-post-in-thread's-date, but I haven't missed that functionality
often.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/