Re: [glosalist] dictd dictionary

Thanks for your time! :)

I know what did you say about the English grammar, and the differences with the glosa. I don’t speak English as a mother language… and I don’t think that its structures “allow people to write both simply and logically”.

In the bits of grammar of glosa, which I’ve read, isn’t clear when one must use the glosa “article”, for introducing a ‘noun phrase’. And, how does one know, where the verb begins? So, how are the (verbal, noun) phrases delimited?

By the other hand, do you say that when elliding those words (in “an ki domi”), one can imagine the words, which aren’t there. Well, I wouldn’t image. I don’t know if “domi” is related to “ki” in any kind of adverb form, or “domi” is used as a verb, as in “being home”, and “an ki” means some kind of “human way of going”, or “a walking human”. - I don’t remember the rules of noun phrases; I image that first go the adjectives, then the noun.

Anyway, in the glosa syntax, it isn’t clear how the words work: as a noun, as a verb, as an adverb, as an adjective… (I talk using the kind-words for european languages).

Besides, there are sentences like “It’s raining”, which are translated almost directly word-by-word to glosa. That kind of sentence is really strange to me. There are more examples of sentences, which are strange to me.

I think that the esperanto syntax is quite simpler than glosa’s.

I’d add to glosa some kind of words, which would tell about the “start of noun phrase”, and “start of verb phrase”… Even the “toki pona” language is clearer than glosa about that.

I expect a more regular grammar, where I can syntactically understand a sentence in only one way, where the syntactic sense of each word is uniquelly determined.

The Esperanto grammar isn’t flawless about that, I know. Everything has to be improved. :) Even the toki pona language isn’t clear about that, by the strange use of words, which may act as prepositions or as normal words.

I really like the idea of the glosa’s morfology - null morfology. But there should be more small-word marks for clearing the syntax, or at least, there should be clear rules about the ellision of them (as done in the lojban language). The syntax of the lojban language is quite good; it allows ellision for the more usual sentences. It would be cool to get a similar regular grammar, but with the target of having a language based in the grammar of the most commonnatural languages. :)

Uf. I imagine that my English is really poor. I may write in Esperanto quite better; but I’ll keep on with English, if the list members want.

I better take a look again to the small glosa’s grammar descriptions ;) I’ve almost forgot everything from them ;)

Bye!

Je la Fri, May 06, 2005 at 12:58:42AM +1000, Robin Fairbridge Gaskell skribis:

Hi Lluis, Best wishes with your University studies. You are right in saying Glosa’s grammar is similar to English.

 But it is misleading to say Glosa's grammar is too close to that of  English.

 The similarity with English is important because the sentence  structure of English allows people to write both simply and logically.  The  differences between the grammars of English and Glosa are also very important, because Glosa keeps the logicality, but avoids what I call  "sloppy" English structures.

 For people who have English as their first language, this distinction  is often overlooked ... when they attempt to write in Glosa, but continue  to think in English!

 If you take an English sentence, and 'transliterate' it into Glosa (IE  translate word for word), you will not necessarily get a syntactically  correct Glosa sentence.  However, were you to use the opposite process, and  transliterate a well-written Glosa sentence into English, you would end up  with a passable,and fairly readily understood English sentence.

 You could say Glosa's sentence structure is a sub-set of the sentence  structure of English... the strictly syntactically correct sub-set of it.

 An ki domi.       is bad Glosa on first sight; it should be,       An  ki ad an domi.    [he go(es)  home]                                                             [he  go(es) to his home]

One does NOT “go” a home: ‘go’ is not strictly transitive; it takes an indirect object (EG ‘to home’), and so needs the preposition - in this case, “to” - to satisfy the rules of syntax.

 However, while people use elipsis in English all the time, leaving out  words all over the place, they can do the same with Glosa, turning full  sentences into abbreviated forms.
 But, the sentences you start off with should be syntactically correct,  resulting in a "vernacular" form of Glosa from which one can imagine, and  readily replace, the missing words, to fill out the *brevi* form to regain  the fully syntactic sentence.

Thus, ~An ki  *  *  domi.~

un-elides to, ~An ki ad an domi.~

Glosa avoids non-literal language (mainly metaphor and idiom) and  ^calls a spade a spade.^  You can guess why: figures of speech vary from  culture to culture.

English has about five inflections; Glosa has none.  Thus we can say  Glosa's grammar is "Syntax-based."   It uses Head final phrase  structure.  In plain language, the most important word in a phrase comes last!
 In a Noun Phrase, the noun is last, and is preceded by the modifiers,  if any, with the *noun flag* ('determinant' or 'article' in English) if  necessary, coming first.

 I did write a Glosa Grammar, and bits of it are still on the Internet  in different places.

 Congratulations on writing a dictd dictionary, I must visit your site.

Saluta ,

Robin Gaskell

At 09:19 PM 4/29/05, you wrote:

Hi!

I attempted to learn glosa some time ago, but I haven’t had enough time (or enough interest to learn it. :)

Anyway, I’ve done a dictd-version of the dictionary glosa-english. You can search in it using the web interface: http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric//cgi-bin/Dict There select the “glosa-english” dictionary.

If someone is interested in the files needed for a own dictd-server, ask, and I’ll send (it’s about 200kb, I think).

I think in the future I’ll write a web page, where the dictd-files will be downloadable. But I’m in a hurry now… university!

• I’ll keep on with glosa. By now I think the grammar is too-similar with English; and there aren’t good explanations of it. That’s what made me loose some interest. (“Tio min bremsis. Mi ne scias pli bone tion diri angle :)”

By now, enjoy the web search engine. It’s quite simple.. don’t try to hack it, you may success ;)

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