Re: [glosalist] Re: Plu hetero questio

At 02:01 AM 12/22/05, Stephan Schneider pa Grafo:

— In glosalist@yahoogroups.com, Robin Fairbridge Gaskell <drought- breaker@p…> wrote:

Pagina 22: “Glosa es eu fono.” -> “Glosa habe eu fono.” Que? *** ~Glosa es eu fono.~ [Glosa is beautiful-sounding] - U-ci habe solo u proxi uti de un akti-verbi, ~es~.

  ~Glosa habe eu fono.~
  [Glosa has good sound] - U-ci eqa u ma normo uti de u lingua.

It irritates me that in Glosa you can say “is sounding” and “sounds”. They are both the same, in my opinion.

#

For speed: English. ~Glosa habe eu fono.~ S / V / O NOUN VERB NOUN Phrase Phrase Phrase ~eu fono~ Modifier/ Substantive NOUN

  This is the purest form of the expression.  By seeking to  impose adjectival forms and continuous tense onto these Glosa  sentences, I believe you are importing 'National Language' structures  to a place where they ought not be.
   ""is"" is a very sloppily used English language verb.  For  this reason, in Glosa there are four possible renditions of ""is"".
     habe  (has the property of)  - this rendition is used in Francais.
       eqa    (is equal to) - for exact scientific equivalence.
       gene (becomes, or is getting)  - for gradual changes
       es     (is the same as) - to be avoided where other usages  are more correct.

“Glosa eu fono.” - “Glosa is beautifully sounding.” = “Glosa sounds beutiful.” “Glosa habe eu fono.” - “Glosa has a beautiful sounding.”

Here for reasons of needing to find a Part of Speech you are

forcing ~eu~ to BE an adverb replete with its “ly”, … modifying its associated VERB. And in the three-word - unnecessarily brief - version you imagine that ~fono~ becomes a NOUN in the ‘Present Participle’ form. Let me say, kindly, that Ron Clark invented Glosa to avoid such unnecessary confusions of form … such as ‘ly’ and ‘ing’ … and, quite simply, I would say they are added to the English language version of the text because your mind imagines they ought to be there. The adverb and participle are NOT there in the Glosa: they are academic forms imposed on language by those wishing to explain the complications of language. Ron Clark attacked the problem, of complexity, from a different angle: he designed a language in which lexical items were primarily concepts, and … their placement determined their function. In English, the people have almost succeeded in throwing out the morphological grammar they were bequeathed by the Germans, Romans and French, and there are very few inflections remaining in the language nowadays. What would happen if the remaining inflections were eliminated? We would end up with an uninflected language that had Syntax-based Grammar, which is my term for the sort of grammar Glosa has.

   It would be a simplified language - deceptively so - that  could be spoken in clear, precise sentences.  The only problem is  that most people do not think what they are going to say before they  open their mouths - and words tumble out, willy nilly.  The use of  syntax to order a language is, in fact, a primary function of the  brain; I am of the unpopular opinion that the brain selects its  concepts, orders them syntactically, then imposes its learnt cultural  grammatical form onto the words so that everyone in that culture can  more-or-less understand each other.

  The concept of Chomsky's Universal Grammar is fairly close to  the idea of a language with a streamlined grammatical pattern devoid  of morphological forms.

#

In terms of:- “Glosa habe eu fono.” - “Glosa has a beautiful sounding.” ^ ~ ^ did you notice that you added a few grammatical niceties to the English not in the Glosa? One Glosa rule might be: where the simple form will do, then that is it. ‘Glosa has beautiful sound.’ is a full sentence, and says everything the writer of the Glosa intended. -FUL is added, not because it is in the original, which is grammatically satisfied by its word order, but by the requirements of English that needs to tell us that the beauty is not an object in itself (VERB function), but that the ‘beauty’ concept is modifying some other object.

###

I think “Glosa is beutiful(ly) sounding” is an angicism that is not appropriate for an auxlang. “Glosa sounds beautiful” should do. “Glosa es eu fono.” should mean only “Glosa is a beautiful sound.’ I couldn’t agree more. However, according to the rules of “HEAD FINAL” phrase structure, a well-formed ‘head final’ phrase has the substantive word (VERB or NOUN) last with the modifiers leading up to them.

    Glosa                                         English
  MODIFIERS                   ADJECTIVES or ADVERBS

Thus, in well formed Glosa, the concepts that are functioning as modifiers are placed before the concepts that are functioning as verbs or nouns.

Translating from English to Glosa: /~~~~ modifier v /~~~ substantive “Glosa sounds beautiful.” —> ~Glosa eu sono.~ verb NOUN / VERB / VERB Phrase Phrase Phrase

#

Or is this only possible when you say “Glosa es u eu fono.”? This may be ‘transliterated’ English; while syntactically correct, it might be semantically awkward as Glosa.

I think now that “u-ci” is a noun. (“Que u-ci es tu domi?”) *** Ya, ~u-ci~ funktio iso u nomina-verbi: uti un England-lingua, na sio uti u verbi, “pro-noun”. Id eqa u speciali Glosa stru: u = the; ci = here. (this)

Gratia, sed … *verbi -> verba - or does “verbi” exist, too?

#

Sorry about this: I tend, on occasion, to speak 'Paleo Glosa'.  Once, when Ron had declared that the terminal vowel was 'floating'  (i.e.optional) I preferred the sound of the terminal -i for this  word.  In fact, my ancient, 1992 GLOSA 6000 dictionary lists 'VERBI word'.

In this case a noun phrase with “domi” would cause the first noun to become an adjective. In this case I would prefer “domi u-ci” (“housy that”) instead of “u-ci domi” (“thaty house”). *** ci = here la = there u-ci = this u-la = that

     Iso u pro-nomina-verba, ~u-ci~ habe u funktio de u deskribe-verbi.

     Id loka intra u nomina-grega es pre u substantia nomina- verbi.

So in a noun phrase the adjective comes first, and then comes the noun, right? But this rule doesn’t always apply, I will look for examples.

#

 Yes Stephan.  Check out the concept of 'Head Final Phrases'.

There are even modern English language text books - often with “Functional Grammar” in their titles - that explain sequences in good English that demonstrate the hierarchy of word elements in a Noun Phrase e.g. these three big brown bears

Try relocating the order and still getting a satisfactory phrase. This is an example of pure Syntax-based Grammar.

Couldn’t Chinese be an interesting example of phrasing these concepts? Their language is isolating as well. *** Id es so. U Cina-pe pa dice a mi ke an lingua habe u homo stru de Glosa.

Cool!

   Sintaxi habe vikto!
  [sintax has victory]    Eng.  Syntax wins.

Que “u bibli ge-grafo ex G. B. Shaw” es “u ge-grafo ex G. B. Shaw bibli”? *** Eng. True, but clunkily so.

Posi: Id es u bibli qi pa es ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw.

       Id es u bibli qi      es ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw.

       Id es u bibli;             ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw.

             U-ci bibli gene ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw.

 Nota:   ~ge-grafo ex G. B. Shaw~ eqa u fo komplexi deskribe-grega.

Gratia. Id es u bibli qui pa es ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw. Ergo “qui pa es ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw” equa u deskribe-grega, que? Plus-co “ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw” equa u deskribe-grega. Sed mu es poste substantia-verba.

#

  With apologies, I might seem to be introducing a new rule at a  late date, but there are in English both "phrases" and "clauses".  Glosa allows  people to use both structures as well.  Rather boringly, I called  them ~plu minor grega~  and ~plu major grega~. (phrases and clauses).
     Notice the three sentences following the word, ~Posi~, above.

       These show how in Glosa we can elide ~qi pa es~ by  replacing the words with a semicolon (;)
       However the elided form, ~;ge-grafo ex G.B. Shaw.~ is  still an adjectival clause modifying the word ~bibli~.   Clauses,  having a VERB of their own are mini sentences in their own right, and  thus have their own Subject-Verb-Object structure.

   IE             ;     qi        pa es ge-grafo     ex G.B. Shaw.
                 /
     Clause      Pronoun      Verb                  Indirect
      marker                      Phrase                Object

  P.S.  I prefer to use the ~gene~ equivalent of "is" rather than  the ~es~ here, because the book ""got"" written over time; and  considering that we have established in the primary clause that it  _is_ a book, it is somewhat semantically repetitive to repeat that it  "is" a book again.  While I probably sound a bit pedantic, I say so  simply to give an example of the confusion which is "is" in English.

“There is” = “il es”, but “It’s getting dark” is “id gene no-foto”. Why not “il gene no-foto?”. Is there any real “id” that’s getting dark? *** Good question. ~il~ was a late addition to the Glosa lexicon: the authors found the need for that indeterminate “there”.

By the way, where are the authors now? Do they still develop Glosa?

#

Wendy lives in Surry in England: Glosa Education Organisation P.O. Box 18, Richmond Surry, TW9 2GE U.K. and has just sent me the eight-page printed periodical, “PLU GLOSA NOTA.” This is edition 91. If you subscribed to this, you would see a lot more Glosa in action. Unfortunately, Ron Clark is no longer with us.

Thank you for all the answers.

Regards, Stephan Schneider

#

Sorry about using so much English, but I wanted to get more deeply into the theory behind Glosa.

Sauta,

Robin Gaskell

Yahoo! Groups Links

____ NOD32 1.1335 (20051222) Information ____

This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus system. http://www.eset.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]