TECH RE: Pretty Little Girls' School

[I.Alexand...@oasis.icl.co.uk]

I've got some detailed comments to come, but there's one
major issue to be resolved here. What does

cmalu je nixli ckule

mean? Example 15.3 suggests that it means

A: school for small things and for girls

and example 15.19 suggests

B: school for things which are small and are girls

and example 15.39 can't seem to make up it's mind.

I think that since

cmalu je nixli

means

[something which is] small and [is a] girl

then example 15.19 must have the right of it. We _can't_ let
tanru modification distribute over logical connectives, since
there is a perfectly straightforward interpretation which means
something different.

Or is it just ambiguous? I doesn't matter much in your examples
in section 6, where the modifiers are essentially adjectival,
but it does matter in general.

Forget that last statement. There is already an ambiguity
between

citno ckule
young ("new") school
youth (young children['s]) school

so

cmalu je citno ckule

could mean

school for things which are small and young
or
school which is small and young
or
small school for young things
or
new school for small things

but some of these work better than others in the distributed
interpretation

ke cmalu ckule ke'e jeke citno ckule [ke'e]

I'm not convinced I like all this rampant ambiguity.

There _are_ technical solutions for expressing "A" above unambiguously.

I would borrow some programming language technology from e.g.
John Backus' 1977 Turing Award Lecture ("Can Programming Be
Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and
Its Algebra of Programs", CACM Aug 1978 Vol 21 #8 pp. 613-641).

Use {ce'o} to construct a sequence of brivla. This is an
essentially formal construction, whose main purpose is to
facilitate further manipulation. Define tanru modification
such that it distributes over sequences, so that

cmalu ce'o nixli ckule

is the same as

ke cmalu ckule ke'e ce'o ke nixli ckule [ke'e]

Then define a "reduction" operator {xe'o} which "inserts" it's
logical-connective left operand between each element of the
right operand sequence's members, so that

je xe'o cmalu ce'o nixli ckule

expands to

ke cmalu ckule ke'e je ke nixli ckule [ke'e]

Of course this would be another grammar change.

Some more detailed comments.

Line after example 3.9:
"Example 2.5" -> "Example 2.8"

Examples 6.10 and 6.11:
"crinu" -> "crino"

Example 7.3:
Are you sure that it isn't {la nu,iark.}? :)

Example 8.6:
To my mind, a _right_-grouping rule would make it

ta ckule co (nixli co cmalu)
ta ckule co cmalu nixli
ta cmalu nixli ckule

Section 13:

pinsi kilri'a:
I was going to suggest {kiltci}, but Nick's {kilbra} is good.

jipci pimla:
{pimlu}

ractu mapke:
{mapku}

cutci sudsau:
(and elsewhere) - {sudysau}

nanmu bakni:
should at least be {ninmu}

cidja barja:
The description's gone wrong here. It's the _tertanru_ which
is describing the place where the _seltanru_ is sold. And then
it's not a specific example of the foregoing.

And in the final group in this section, I would classify as follows:

smacu terkavbu:
zdani turni:
zerle'a [nun]terpa:
cevni zekri:
Object of (potential) action
{cevni zekri} is the most dubiously thus classified, but it _does_
correspond to the x2 of {zekri}.

kanla djacu:
Source of product

cag[y]cecmu zdani:
Place where object (typically) is

OK, I give up on {ladru denci}.

Section 14:

sonci toe'rdarsi:
{to'erdarsi} - and I might have chosen {to'ervirnu}

Oh, and for completeness, you might as well mention {jai}
in section 10.

mi'e .i,n.