Ollock wrote:
Golahet wrote:
Whether a language is unambiguous or not is a binary opposition, even if it is a matter of degree how ambiguous an ambiguous language is.
Please show me a totally unambiguous language. If any of the loglangs and engelangs out there have achieved zero ambiguity, I highly doubt it's a user-friendly one.
Why does whether any conlang has achieved it matter?
I'm not talking about the set of
existing languages, but the set of
possible languages.
What's the source of your doubt?
In my conlang, whenever a clause is directly followed by an adverb phrase, it must be terminated with a particle that indicates that the clause ends there, otherwise the adverb phrase will unambiguously be a part of that clause. Likewise, whenever a noun phrase is directly followed by an adjective phrase, it must be terminated with a particle that indicates that the noun phrase ends there, otherwise the adjective phrase will unambiguously be a part of that noun phrase. This principle applies to all constituent types that have heads that could take modifiers.
Also, every word that takes arguments have a single valency, and the number of overt arguments must exactly match this valency. Thus if you have a bivalent verb you are prohibited from leaving out the object, instead you need to use an anti-passive voice or something else to reduce the valency of the verb if you want to omit it, e.g. "I know" and "I know it" use different forms of the verb "know".
It also has an anaphoric system where anaphoric "pronouns" incorporate a part of the root of their antecedent to unambiguously refer back to the latest clause or noun phrase where the head verb or noun contained that root segment, and if you want to refer back to the previous possible clause or noun phrase you add another affix to the anaphor, and you could add any number of such affixes to refer back to any possible antecedent that might have appeared far before the anaphor.
Additionally, the language lacks polysemy and null derivation completely.
These are some highlights that hopefully help you see how a language could be unambiguous without being unnatural or ridiculously complex. That is, the unnatural feature of being unambiguous for arbitrarily complex sentences emerges from the interaction of simple and natural features.
(My conlang isn't finished, but that isn't due to any problem in creating an unambiguous language. The reason I'm not finished is that there are a lot of other design criteria that I try to make it satisfy, e.g. that it should have only one open lexical class. Creating a language that has no other design criteria than being unambiguous is no challenge and no fun.)
Quote:
Quote:
My point is that having VSO word order and allowing nouns to be used attributively isn't a problem to begin with. Only if you make a lot of assumptions about the rest of the language will it be a problem.
This confuses me. Are you saying that it wouldn't be a problem even if
it did have attributive nouns?
What does that last "it" refer to? Does it refer to my main conlang, or does it refer to that generic hypothetical language I was talking about? If the former: No, if I changed my conlang to allow them and made no other change to it, then it would become ambiguous. If the latter: Yes. A language that is VSO and allows nouns to be used attributively could be unambiguous. It depends on the other features of the langauge, and there is no primacy to the features that would make it ambiguous, thus assuming that the unstated features are such that the language is ambiguous just begs the question.
Quote:
Are you suggesting that I assumed that the language had attributive nouns a priori (which I didn't, I asked you whether it had them)?
No.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
= ![[:D]](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin2.png ":D"){kind=icon}
| 
= ![[:S]](./images/smilies/icon_confused2.png ":S"){kind=icon}
| 
= ![[:'(]](./images/smilies/icon_crying2.png ":'("){kind=icon}
![[:)]](./images/smilies/icon_smile2.png ":)"){kind=icon}
| ![[:(]](./images/smilies/icon_sad2.png ":("){kind=icon}
| 
![[+1]](./images/smilies/plusone.png "+1")
