Re: brz, or Plan B revisited (LONG)

Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> R A Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>I must have another read of Jeff's paper and see if I cannot do
>>something more than just give brz a "hexadecimal phonology".
>
>
> 'brz' is definitely an idea that deserves further exploration.
Thanks. I was looking again at Jeff's paper last evening. I wonder, in
fact, how the advocates of Loglan and Lojban view his paper. Would they
consider his ideas as outlines for an near-optimal loglang, I wonder.

Certainly, 'Plan B' is the outline for a engelang, but the sort of
syntax Jeff proposes seems to me rather different from that of a loglang
which, if I have understood aright, is based on clausal form logic.

What Jeff seems to be working towards is a method in which a stream of
characters (whether alphabetic or of binary digits or, indeed, any other
characters such as Tengwar) can be _unambiguously_ :
(a) broken up into morphemes or, as Jeff calls them, 'affixes';
(b) the affixes reconstituted as a binary tree.

(a) appeals to me very much as this is precisely what I have tried to
achieve in the various incarnations of briefscript, BrSc, BrScA, BrScB,
~bax etc - self-segregating morphemes. For that very reason, I am
looking at this closely.

But when I look at (b) I have some reservations. In the section headed
'Example" Jeff begins: "Let's build a toy language using this syntax."
But the examples given are IMO just relexifications of English, cf.:
Gl tkn  jl.
I  like you.

Ckl tkn   gl.
She likes me.

Gl mgn   hbn ccl.
  I drive the car.

Gl mgn   ckn ccl.
  I drive her car.

Gl cnn mgn  bn ccl.
  I can drive a car.

Gl tks  ckl mgn     gn ccl.
  I like her driving my car.

Gl mln  mgn   gn ccl thn jl.
I  will drive my car to  you.


The word order, use of a future auxiliary and of definite & indefinite
articles is 100% English.

Another point that I question is his use a 'precedence grammar'. He
rightly says "Humans are not very good at dealing with parentheses, as
any Lisp programmer can attest!" but I have reservations about his
method of dealing with this. The word final affixes 'l' and 'v' (and
others) denote the precedence for each word, thus:

     bl cln dl bdv gl  ==  (bl cln dl) bdv gl
but
     bl clv dl bdl gl  ==  bl clv (dl bdl gl)

just as
     a  *   b   +  c   ==  (a  *   b)  +   c

but
     a  +   b   *  c   ==  a   +  (b   *   c)

Umm - but that is only a problem if we use an inorder tree traversal.
Postorder & preorder traversals produce unambiguous strings without the
need for precedence. Thus:

1.the above four strings produced by preorder traversal (prefix notation):
bd cl b d g
cl b bd d g
+ * a b c
+ a * b c

2.the above four strings produced by postorder traversal (postfix notation):
b d cl g bd
b d g bd cl
a b * c +
a b c * +

(The examples use white space as separators. In Jeff's languages white
space should not be needed, but we will need some way of marking word
boundary. Jeff does this by combining word-boundary _and_ precedence.)

The prefix forms are more reminiscent of Loglan/ Lojban word order. But
Jeff does not consider either possibility, either of which would not
require a precedence grammar. So why does he keep infix order, which
necessitates a precedence grammar? The answer seems to me to be 'so that
we can retain the English word order' (tho this is not explicitly stated).

What Jeff seems to me to have done is to provide a way whereby one may
analyze an English sentence as a binary tree and then generate an
continuous stream of characters (alphabetic, bits or whatever) which
both maintains the same word order as English and unambiguously
represents that tree. Ingenious - but a wee bit anglocentric, methinks.

But maybe if I consider postfix or prefix order......

--
Ray
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