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Better grammar discussion

patbe91 ("patbe91" <patbe91@...>) on June 16, 2008

Hello!

I am new to glosa and I am strongly convinced by the basic idea of=

concept-words, the affixes and much more.

I have read the ‘seminar1’ pr= oblems. I still think that no language should be misused by trying to tran= slate word by word and see if it works. Any language has its own way of ex= pression and trying to copy a european-language sentence directly into glo= sa is likely to fail.

Nevertheless, I have had quite some problems underst= anding glosa sentences. And although writing in glosa might look easy at f= irst sight, I think it is in fact difficult to avoid ambiguities. This ha= s already been discussed here before, and I think the fact that most conve= rsation here takes place in English is hinting at this problem. In my opin= ion Daniel Macouin has some good ideas to improve the language, however, a= s he remarks, ‘heavy’ ones. Perhaps some more English ‘benchmark sentences= ‘ are needed which would be translated into standard glosa and variants li= ke pan-glosa, as a basis for discussing precision and elegance.

I like Da= niel Macouin’s ideas but also propose here another solution for one of the= problems.

My example sentence is:

U paleo kali avi kanta…

Does the = above mean: “The old beautiful bird sings…” or “The old, beautiful bird-= tune…” or “The Old sings beautiful bird-tunes…” is not immediately obv= ious, it is hidden in the semantics. We need to mark the noun. In fact glo= sa already has noun-markers. The U is marking the noun, however I really d= o not understand why it is not placed next to the noun, like:

Paleo kali = u avi kanta.

This would immediately signal to the reader that kanta is NOT= the noun, but avi is. This way, the U would serve two goals, to signal n= umber and Subject of the sentence. Did I miss any reason for placing the “= U” at the beginning of the sentence, except for being similar to English? =

This was my simple suggestion. But nevertheless, Pan-Glosa has better c= hanges to offer.

The “ge” to mark ‘verbs of state’ =3D adjectives is a ve= ry nice thing. We still think too much in the categories of european gramm= ar, I think.

In fact, when we say in glosa

“U avi habe (u) ponde”, “U av= i es ponde” and “U avi ponde”; A bird has a weight, a bird is heavy, a bir= d weighs…

In all three cases we mean that “a bird has the property of we= ight”. All other differences are differences of European grammatical cate= gories. And because of this, some English people try to avoid the word “be= “. A bird is not a weight! It is ambiguous and not very elegant.

So I do= not like the “es” very much and to indicate that ponde is a noun is not n= ecessary. So although glosa explicitly wants to avoid the pseudo-informati= on which exists in these Europein-style constructs, it we can write glosa = like this. But at the same time it does not provide unambiguous ways of ex= pressing the real content: The interrelation of a noun’s properties and ac= tions, where it lacks some markers. On the other hand the Chinese property= -marker is ‘de’ in the order adjective - de - noun. weight - de - avi

So = I think “U avi ge ponde” is much more elegant than glosa’s options and “no= un - property marker - property - action marker - action” really seems a g= ood scheme, in my opinion.

I myself had tried to implement such a scheme b= y using “qa” as the property “qalita” marker and “ak” as the “aktio” marke= r before reading Daniel’s posts:

E.g. “Tri dromo-pe qa celero e fo-sono e= excesi sudo e alti keiro ak dice qa celero e excita e fo-sono tem dromo.”=

Or also:

Celero e fo-sono e excesi sudo e alti keiro (plu) tri dromo-pe = ak dice qa celero e excita e fo-sono tem dromo.

But ge and go are of cour= se equivalent.

I think pan-glosa might be:

Celero fo\sono excesi\sono al= ti\keiro tri dromo-pe go dice ge celero excita fo\sono tem dromo.

I stil= l contemplate if “jo” and “li” are needed.

Jo Pan-glosa go es li u evolve= de Glosa …

is more complicated than

Pan-glosa ge u evolve de Glosa …=

or even shorter:

Pan-glosa ge evolve de Glosa …

I will continue thin= king about that.

Patrick

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Better grammar discussion - Committee on language planning, FIAS. Coordination: Vergara & Hardy, PhDs.