An elegant distinction (was Re: brz, or Plan B revisited (LONG))

On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 12:45:59 -0400, Jörg Rhiemeier
<joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

>> Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> writes:
>> >...
>> > > For evaluation purposes, I do find the post-fix order easier (too
>> much
>> > > Reverse Polish, no doubt  :)
>> >
>> > My personal taste goes more towards a prefix order.  But at any rate
>> > NOT SVO!  That's unelegant, and the notions of "subject" and "object"
>> > doesn't apply well to loglangs anyway.
>>
>> Just curious: why 'unelegant'?  I can understand that for more than
>> two arguments, you get an asymmetry that might create the unelegance
>> feeling.
>
> Yes.  I was referring to Lojban-style languages where predicates
> can have any number of arguments, and surely "X1 P X2 X3 X4" as
> found (to my meager knowledge) in Lojban is not very elegant,
> is it?
I think I see the problem. You guys seem to be conflating or confusing the
artistic sense of "elegant" as "attractive" with the computer science
sense of "elegant" as "well-designed".

I think. Maybe. Certainly, it's a concept that needs to be more clearly
defined when talking of loglangs and engelangs.

It's an interesting usage point, I think, and kinda leads into the
question:

In what ways does your conlang partition semantic space differently to
your native language? I'm most interested in the subtle, non-obvious or
non-trivial ways this happens in different contexts or fields of
discussion, but anything goes.

I suspect this may require, in some cases, discussion of the ways your
native language partitions semantic space differently to English, but I
think I wouldn't mind that at all.



Paul