Re: New Language

At 12:23 AM -0400 12/15/98, dunn patrick w wrote:
>I'm working on a new language, and I thgought I'd seek some input.  It's
>an inflected language, w.o. VSO.
>
>I've established a system of particles I call "sentence determinates".
>They determine the mood and tense of the verb, as well as the exact
>meaning of various ambiguo8us words.
>
>For instance, the sentence "kipe prk@t saskot ko" means "chased dog cat
>neutral".  A statement of plain fact.  "kipe prk@t saskot e" means
>"chased dog cat negative".  In other words, the damned dog chased the
>damn cat, damn it.  ;)
>
>Where the determinates get sticky is with the use of ambiguous words.
>These are of two types, value judgements and gendered terms.  For
>instance, the word "sena" means "good/bad" depending on the determinate used.
>
>"kipe prk@t senat saskot e"  "The bad dog chased the cat."
>
>"kipe prk@t senat saskot @k"  "The good dog chased the cat."
>
>"kipe prk@t senat saskot te"  "The bad dog chases the cat."
>
>"kipe prk@t senat saskot po*"  "The good dog chases the cat."
>
>"kipe prk@t senat saskot teka"  "The good dog may have chased the cat."
>
>etc.
>
>My problem is this: (and if you've read this far, you must care)  How do
>I compound these damned ambiguous terms?  For instance, what if the dog
>is also "fast/slow" (sena)?  I considered having a separate determinate
>for each word in the sentence, but that seems to defeat the purpose.  I
>could also make a grammatical rule aganst using more than ambuiguous term
>in a clause.  What think ye?
It seems that youmay have some trouble combining word meaning selection
with modal/tense operations (past / present / (conditional / subjunctive)),
and making it work out nicely.

Of course, if you made a "one ambiguous word only" rule, you could add
clauses or full sentences to complete a thought.

For compounding, I'd be tempted to maybe include a very reduced form of one
of the particles to mark _one_ of the poles of opposition, even though both
poles get a full morpheme in a sentence. So prk@tesenat would be a baddog,
possibly a special kind of wild dog, well-known for attacking children. A
prk@tsenat (no particle) would be a gooddog (perhaps meaning domesticated
canid of any sort).

you could use full morphemes of course.

Or you could use a positional thing:
senatprk@t would be a bad dog, and prk@tsenat would be a good dog:
reversing the usual order of modifier modified would change the meaning of
the ambiguous term. There would still be ambiguity as to polarity in
multiple compounds, but that is usually true, though for different reasons:
for instance a good-dog-beater could be a good beater of dogs
good-(dog-beater) or a beater of good dogs (good-dog)-beater. You could
also use intonation/accent strategies to disambiguate this, as we do in
English speech.

  -- David
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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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