[NGL] Translation: Ku Valak siya à Weksaforda
Jack Durst
Date: Mon, 11 Oct 1999 01:53:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gerald Koenig <j...@netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Re: [NGL] Translation: Ku Valaksiya ŕ Weksaforda
From: Gerald Koenig <j...@netcom.com>
>
>From: Stephen DeGrace <c72...@morgan.ucs.mun.ca>
>
>On Mon, 4 Oct 1999 18:33:38 -0700 (PDT), Gerald Koenig
><j...@netcom.com> wrote:
>
>>From: Gerald Koenig <j...@netcom.com>
>>>
>>>On Sat, 2 Oct 1999 21:46:26 -0700 (PDT), Gerald Koenig
>>>>From: Gerald Koenig <j...@netcom.com>
>>>>xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>>>>>From: Stephen DeGrace <c72...@morgan.ucs.mun.ca>
Hi Stephen,
I have just gotten back onto the mailing list after a 2 hour struggle
with the text html homepage at Onelist, I still don't know why my
status changed but I fixed it by just resetting everything to the same
values. So I am a bit burnt out, but I do so much appreciate the
thought you put into your replies that I will try to respond tonite.
>[...]
>>This means there are at least 1000 suffixes with the potential to be
>>homophonic words. Probably not a major problem for humans with context
>>and common sense, but why not keep this language easy to machine parse?
>>At least, why not make accents optional.
The below tutorial really makes the system much clearer to me. I see
that the accent will have to be moved from the normal place; that is
the first sylable, I believe. Tibe is pronounced TI-be. (I am
accent-challenged on this keyboard). Tiribe is pronounced TI-ri-be by
the first sylable accent rule. What I don't understand is, whether or
not TIR-i-be is legal. I assume it is not. If it is, an accent over the
R could mark it. If TIR-i-be is illegal, the accent has to be shifted
to the second sylable, yielding ti-RI-be. That distinguishes in speech
and in writing, the participle tiRIbe from another word with normal
accent, TIribe (however it comes to be defined). They are not
homophones, they just happen to have the same letter sequence; they are
still distinct due to the written and spoken accent.
>From a post by Julian, I believe:
ngl-pattern => CV | VC | CVC | VCV
-----
This ngl-pattern is the basic assumption I am going on.
Coming to my nemesis word, bokvaibaco, it has the form
CVC-CVVC-CVC
I assume the diphthong CVVC is equivalent to the required
canonical CVC. Else it looks (to me) like an illegal word.
The pronunciation is BOKvaibaco. However, the -aco here stands for
ACCusative-1P. I think this word and its more than 1000 similars should
be written and said bokvaibACO, to distinguish the three part compound
word from the two part compound with the case marking. It's traditional
to accent terminal _verb forms in Spanish, let's face it TVS is
neo-latin; and above all this would be a help to machine parsing. We
should not overlook opportunities to make NGL machine compatible where
it is not awkward.
itm bok
def book
itm vaib
def unit, word
itm aco
def blow
>Basically, there _is_ no distinction in the _affect_ of grave and
>acute. As I wrote before, the distinction is functional, that is,
>grave accents indicate stress that is intrinsic to the _meaning_ of
>the word, if you like, whereas an acute accent indicates stress that
>is purely a whim on the moment, and is mainly a literary convention to
>distinguish irregularlar stress that's grammatically necessary versus
>irregaular stress that comes from spur-of-the-moment artistic
>embellishment or variation. If you put accents on your infixes, for
>example, {těribe} for {tIRibe}, it is redundant, because the regular
>stress on an NGL word is on the first syllable _anyway_, so the accent
>would make no difference in speech. Accents on first syllables are
>rare, one exception that shows up in the corpus is {nŕzka}, "quarter",
>which is a shortening of {inŕz ka}, "divide by four", and retains the
>accent from its source expression purely as a spelling convention.
>Now, if you want the infix to be *non*-stressed, that's different. If
>you want it to be that the syllable _after_ the infix always get's
>principle stress, a good way to do this is the make a rule that you
>put a grave accent on the syllable _after_ the infix, like {tirěbe},
>which is pronounced like tir-IB-e, capiatals indicating a stressed
>syllable.
>
>[explanation of vector length words snipped]
>
>Thanks for the discussion on this, and I do think that the addition of
>the ability to distinguish time and space vectors, if one is so
>inclined, is interesting.
>
>>But this may not address the metaphorical difference that you feel.
>>I thought about your "material" preference for time conceptualization
>>and I realized that the idiom:
>>
>>"We don't have a <whole lot of time> since school started" embodies
>>your metaphor of time as a material substance, a "lot".
>>
>>The closest I can come in VXT to this metaphor would be to consider a
>>row of adjacent Time-Atoms on the time-line as bagged up into a lot or
>>set. One could then say, " met: I don't have a large set of
>>Time-Atoms...". That uses the underlying basis of the vector system
>>and avoids the use of vectors. But I will understand if this still
>>doesn't represent your intuitions. Anyway, let me know what you think
>>of these potential additions to VXT.
>
>Well, they're interesting and worth trying. But I _would_ like some
>minimal non-proprietary item in the general vocabulary to handle these
>sorts of concepts, and I don't want to be stuck with having to use the
>space metaphor implied by {korti}. With such a large and important
itm korti
tp Adj
st acc JD
def long
>block of the vocabulary essentially totally proprietary and
>furthermore under construction, I would like to see a certain minimal
>level of co-existing "public lisence" forms (borrowing the term from
>Linux :-) ). I don't consider this particular case unreasonable, after
>all, the word {korti} is doing a very similar thing with space as
>{heka} is doing with time, and is working from an image that is much
>more directly co-occupying the space of VXT than {heka} is. In general
>I think we have enough general vocabulary space and time words, but in
>this case I _feel_ (note the choise of words :-) ) a lack. So while it
>may most likely see a reduction in its currency when VXT gets more
>beyond its experimental stages, I am going to keep forward my proposal
>of {heka}, adverbial nature and all.
Well it won't be that long till the spacewords are released. And there
is a certain assymetry in having korti an adj. and heka an adv, I think
Jack noted this. If you're going to do this I would like to see some
words based on your metaphor of "materiality" for time, there would have
to be a polar to heka, a large "amount" of time. That would give future
users of the lang a choice of metaphors, depending perhaps on the
situation described, or just personal preference for more "solid"
symbolizations.
>
>[...]
>>>Sorry for the snips, but I only wanted to say here, thank you very
>>>much for the feedback on my use of VST. I feel that it is only through
>>
>>Thanks for using it. As you have said before, it is through usage that
>>we get to really understand these theories, me included. I have a very
>>strong belief in the underlying logic of VXT because it is a
>>back-translation to language from mathematics. But since I'm not
>>formally trained either as a mathematician or a linguist, a lot of
>>reality testing of my new system is in order. The only 100 year old
>>concept of the vector is still evolving.
>
>Heh, join the club (lack of formal training in this, I mean :-) ).
>
>For me, that is the great charm of a project like this - reality
>testing. To me, this sort of work is the true forge of ideas, it has
>amazing capacity to teach you new things and point out new ideas to
>you that you would never have thought of purely in the comfort of your
>own head :-), and it is the ultimate test and ultimate grounding of
>the validity of ideas. I tend to find that things usually work out
>differently than what I might have first envisioned, sometimes only a
>bit, sometimes quite a lot, but the exercise of taking visions and and
>making them _real_ by making them interact with reality is endlessly
>fascinating - at least in part because of its element of
>unpredictabilty. It is my joy in this that I suppose is responsible
>for my tendency to test drive new ideas before they maybe strictly
>speaking should be let out of the workshop... :-)
>
>[...]
>>>2) _Is_ there a way to say "aside" as in "the old man gently
>>>stepped aside" in VST without specifying the side (i.e., without
>>>specifying whether he stepped to the right or the left, if you really
>>>don't know which or if the information isn't considered important to
>>>the story being told)? Or is this the sort of thing best handled with
>>>an Ogdenism like {dosig}?
>>
>>It's a new question, but there is a way, just saying right of or left
>>of for aside. I have the unpublished words
>>
>>ior i or i or (object) right of the.. derecho del
>>inor in i or -i or (object) left of the.. izquierdo del
>>
>>so <dumin pa pas ior/inor ku [assailant]>
>>
>>where the understood object is the assaulting lady would say it but
>>maybe another word, say <bior> is needed for ior/inor. The object of
>>origin could be implicit, that is whose right or left wouldn't have to
>>be said.
>>
>>I'll think about it, I'm running out of those elusive droplets,
>>time-atoms:).
i-------
>
>Is there a way that you could say motion on an axis without specifying
>direction on the axis? That would solve the problem. Maybe define
>{bi-} as meaning "positive/negative unknown/undetermined".
I am getting some dissonance here. Consider the above situation: The
woman charges the man, he steps aside. We don't want to be forced to
specify which side but we want to say that he does move generally to
the right or left, or both if he has time; his own or the woman's. Ok,
bi-ior==> bior does that. "dumin pas bior" says the man moved right or
left, maybe both in a time interval. "dumin pas bior ku dulin" says he
moved to the right or left or both of_ the woman_. "-or dulin" sets her
as origin. However I don't describe this as motion on an axis unless
you mean the i axis* of the man, the assaultee. That would be "dumin pas
bior", the man moved right or left or both with reference to himself as
default origin along his own i axis. I appreciate your argument that
the i,-i axis, the right, left axis has its special more symmetrical
and equivalent character than the j,-j and k, -k (ju, inju and ke,
inke) axes. But I see no reason why they shouldn't also have bi- forms
which are the analogs of aside, meaning above or below or both, and in
front of or behind, or both. Following your example of rolling things
out of the workshop somewhat unfinished, here is the current state of
the section I drew the above example from:
*i, right
-i, left
j, front
-j, back
k, overhead
-k, underfoot
SPATIAL RELATIVE WORDS:
Word Derivation Math origin English Spanish
ior i or i or (object) right of the.. derecho del
inor in i or -i or (object) left of the.. izquierdo del
jor ju or j or (object) in front of the.. adelante del
ijor in ju or -j or (object) behind the.. atras de la
kor ke or k or (object) above the.. encima de la
ikor in ke or -k or (object) below the.. abajo de la
EQUIVALENT CONTRASTING REDUNDANT FORMS FOR NOISY ENVIRONMENTS:
iorde right of the...
inorvo left of the....
jorma in front of the...
ijorlet behind the...
korget above the.....
ikormin below the.....
So, adding tonite the bi forms:
------------------------
bi-or, bior::- left or right or both if <pas> has the analogs:
bi-jor, bijor::- in front of, behind, or both possible if pas (move)'
bi-kor, bikor::- above, below, or both possible if pas.
with <dis>, located, the agent can only be in one place, which is not
specified.
with <pas>, moving, the agent can be one or the other or both places
["sides"] depending on the situation. (zoz means oscillating.)
time interval and speed.
------------------------------------
ma, min, de, vo, get, let.
+ - rt lt > <
The reference object may be the speaker if identified, or a
projected anthropomorphic; or defective abstract object origin;
such as a line, surface, rectangle, spheroid, etc.
The default translation of the X-or origin-words includes the definite
article. If singular, "a", (ol) or plural is wanted it must be
inserted and it will override the default:
She jumped over the fence.
Zad hanai' kor noy.
She jumped over nine fences.
Zad hanai' kor ne noyes.
She jumped over a fence.
Zad hanai' kor ol noy.
She was going across under the fence.
Zam pastar ikor noy.
Za am pas-tar in ke (-k) or noy.
The wall is located in front of you:
Ku noy dis jor vu. Or, what is the same thing;
Ku noy disliv jor uvu.
[The dative case (uvu) is here modified in an ablative sense by the
use of -liv, (away from). This is a redundant form showing the
flexibility and unambiguity of the grammar.]
The wall is located in front of the speaker or protagonist:
Ku noy disju.
The ball was moving left of the net.
Ku moy am pas ikor mostai'
Ior mes. Right of the table.
Inor mes. Left of the table.
Everyone is more than welcome to use these new spacewords. That is why
I am in favor of the informal category, so they could be put in the
vocabulary list. What is still proprietary about them is my right to
modify them and improve them as I see fit. They are new to me and I
need to see how they work before I propose them formally.
I may not have thought of the <bi> forms without your question and
composition. Once again I am in your debt for contribution to VXT, I
should really call the bi forms the DeGrace forms, if you don't mind. I
hope your material time adverbs work out, fine expressions of spatial
and temporal tense are a hallmark of modern sophisticated language,
which I passionatly want NGL to be.
Jerry
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