Re: Articles in conlangs (was: CHAT translating the Paternoster)

Ray Brown scripsit:

> Ach!  2002 and e-grave still cannot be sent safely via email!
> What on earth is '=E8' meant to be?
It's the hex value in Latin-1 for e-grave.  Your text was safely put into
quoted-printable form (using =xx to represent non-ASCII characters)
and safely removed from it and read by me.  I was just careless about
removing the quoted-printable encoding before echoing it back.

> I guess all the romanized Greek I've been
> writing recently is still getting mangled.   How much longer do we have to
> suffer this anglocentric mangling of diacritics?
As Irving Berlin didn't quite say:

There's no ASCII but US-ASCII, the only ASCII I know,
Everything about it is U.S.-based,
Everything about it's seven-bit.
You do that X3.4 wheeler-dealing, when you're feeling retro-fit.

There's no ASCII but US-ASCII, it's Unicode's first half-row,
Though it is a turkey that we know must die,
While systems chop off the bits that are high,
It is the only charset that will always fly,
ASCII, on with the show!
ASCII, on with the show!

(ASCII was originally American National Standard X3.4.; it is now
International Standard 646.)

> Both he and I are using the term 'definite article' in traditional usage.
Of course, but I think that French 'la', unlike English 'the', does not
license such inferences about "conceptual essence"; it is becoming (if
not quite uniformly) grammaticalized as a label for NPs.

> This, it seems to me, is so often overlooked by IAL makers who blithely
> give their
> language a 'definite article' or 'definite' & 'indefinite' articles,
> without being exactly explicit about their usage.
I agree, and I hold up Loglan/Lojban as a shining example of precise definition
of articles/determiners.

> BrSc - whether BrScA or BrScB - will have no articles   :)
Also an excellent choice:  Voksigid, closely related to the Loglan
tradition, has none.

> I don't think the _merely_ does it justice.   Why assume the 'definite'
> article is the default in French to be used if the indefinite or the
> partitive does not apply?   There are also contexts in which nouns are
> not preceded by any article, e.g. il est professeur = he is a teacher.
But these are increasingly rare.  In OF there were many such cases:
in ModF they are few indeed.

--
John Cowan   jcowan@reutershealth.com   http://www.reutershealth.com
    "Mr. Lane, if you ever wish anything that I can do all you will have to do
        will be to send me a telegram asking and it will be done."
    "Mr. Hearst, if you ever get a telegram from me asking
        you to do anything you can put the telegram down as a forgery."

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