Re: [glosalist] Kani vora vora

Karo Vasily e plu Amika, It’s late at night and I can’t go through each sentence in detail, but here are my thoughts: a. There may be a good reason within Russian language usage for having free syntax, IE no set order of Subject, Verb and Object. However I now prefer to think of these three element of a sentence as phrases, and their roles being ‘Actor’, ‘Action’ and Recipient’.

b. While indicating the receiver of the action with a distinctive (Esperanto-like) particle, “o”, I can see this leads to the possibility of poetically fluid sentence structure, however, I think that in normal (S-V-O) sentence structure, this might be an unnecessary redundancy. If there are two substantives each marked with a ~u~, and these are separated by another substantive, which is obviously acting as a VERB, then the ~U kani vora u sito.~ form is both adequate and unambiguous. N.B. I use ~sito~ = food.

c. While using poetic licence, a creative person is quite able to rearrange his sentences to suit his purposes, the scientific writer will most likely wish to follow a streamlined, more-or-less rule-based syntax. For this reason, I believe that a simple syntax, in which Glosa can be fairly simply spoken/written and accordingly reasonably easily understood/read by human communicators, AND also machine-parsed by computers suggests the retention of the most simplified form of the language.

d. I will agree that elision (omission of optional words) is an extremely legitimate, and very functional, dimension to the production of sentences in Glosa. However, I feel that elision is being overdone, if it causes the reader/listener to stop and think about the syntax. So, I think that it’s better to err on the side of more syntax, than less.

e. My feeling about using ~u~ and ~o~ as Noun Phrase markers, and as well allowing free order - within reason - of the S, V, & O elements of the sentence will make the learning of Glosa considerably more difficult.

f. It is a little hard for me to explain the way I think of the usage of ~u~. When Ron first told me it was not a replacement for “the” or “a” but more of a signpost leading into a Noun Phrase, I had a bit of trouble; but now, I see ~u~ and ~plu~ not only as necessary syntactic markers, but also as retaining something of the “articles” of English; thus I would see these particles as having rather special - perhaps dual - usage in Glosa.

g. The ~u-ci~ and ~u-la~ Relative Pronouns have a reasonably clearly defined derivation, and I feel that clipping the ~u-~ part would not help the language.

h. Admittedly, for me, as a native speaker of English, both the S-V-O order and the formation of Head Final phrases, comes fairly naturally. But, even so, I feel that there is plenty of psychological back-up evidence for Ron Clark’s original choice of these among the Glosa specification.

     For all of these reasons, I believe that the alterations to  the language suggested by you would tend to create a very different  language, and get a significant distance away from the original  conception of Glosa.

     It's 3:30 a.m. and I must go to bed.  Sorry if I did not  treat each example with the consideration they deserved.

Saluta,

Robin

At 04:13 PM 2/23/06, you wrote:

Kani vora vora

Karo plu glosa-pe!

Glosa is the finest IAL now.

I have an idea of how to improve Glosa and to make it greatly more flexible, original and popular. And I want to inform about it all of you.

Let’s look on the simple Glosa sentence, for example:

 Gl: U kani vora u vora.
 En: A dog eat a food.

Here, in the Glosa sentence: First ~U~ is a noun marker (article). Second ~U~ is a noun marker too.

I suggest to refuse of using ~U~ as a noun marker.

What if?

Let’s take up ~U~ as a s~U~bject phrase marker (S-marker).

Further, let’s add new marker: ~O~ as an ~O~bject phrase marker (O-marker), wich in most cases may be omitted.

(It slightly simulates -o and -on in Esperanto)

Further. Yet we have the verb primitives: NU, DU, PA, FU, NE and ES, EQI, all of wich indeed play a role of verb phrase markers (directly or indirectly).

We can add to them else a new optional verb marker JE, which is nor tense particle nor aspect particle, and usually it may be omitted.

jE is a v~E~rb phrase marker

Example: (~DU~ have a function of the verb marker here)

U kani du vora o vora. S V O

Example with the marker JE: U kanu je vora o karni = U kani vora o karni S V O ……………………..