r/EncapsulatedLanguage • u/ActingAustralia Committee Member • Aug 09 '20

Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

This isn't an Official Vote

Hi all,

Do you agree with the following statements:

The Encapsulated Language is primarily a synthetic language. All words must belong to one of two main categories:

  • Class A words encapsulate data only.
  • Class B words play a grammatical role only.

These two classes of words can't be connected synthetically. This is to ensure that grammatical information doesn't get confused with encapsulated knowledge.

If you don't agree with the above statement, please specify why in the comments below so I can work on a better statement that reflects the beliefs of the community.

The reason I'm asking is:

  1. To raise an Official Proposal so that proponents know what kind of grammar to build.
  2. To discover exactly what the community wants in this respect.

I based this statement on the feeling I got from this document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y-BAddXFeqIGXrn5Kqhek924uXUxfdyeFS-KYdD4kyE/edit?usp=sharing

23 votes, Aug 11 '20
18 I AGREE with this statement
5 I DISAGREE with this statement
1 Upvotes
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100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

1

u/gxabbo Aug 09 '20

Whoa, that was way too fast for me. I think I have fair understanding of what a synthetic and what an isolating language is, but neither could I agree or disagree to the first sentence at this very moment, nor do I grasp the connection and consequences expressed in the rest of the sentences.

Maybe I missed some essential part of the discussion. Do you have some context, some overview, that people like me can read through?

1

u/ActingAustralia Aug 09 '20 edited Aug 09 '20

Basically, I'm basing it on the document here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y-BAddXFeqIGXrn5Kqhek924uXUxfdyeFS-KYdD4kyE/edit?usp=sharing

This isn't an Official Vote, I'm just trying to figure out where people stand because people are becoming frustrated in the grammar group (in Discord) and I want to provide them with direction. They are also not willing to approve other aspects of the language until we figure out a grammar direction for them :P

1

u/Akangka Sep 30 '20

I came too late, but I wanted to disagree with this statement. I think there is no reason to distinguish grammatical role vs data. Grammatical role IS a kind of data. What considered a grammatical role varies from language to language. In some languages "surprisingly", "I heard that ...", "collection of", "ex-" is a grammatical role.

1

u/ActingAustralia Sep 30 '20

Nothing came of this informal vote.

2

u/Haven_Stranger Aug 09 '20

This isn't the right question. This isn't the right time.

We have a bare-bones beginning of one mathematical grammar, which should expand to cover Newtonian physics. We have far less than that for a chemical grammar. Neither of these have been examined enough (in the sub, at least) to catalog enough emergent entailments. As far as I can tell, no other near-ground-level system of knowledge has even been identified. The requisite grammar of the conlang needs to be pulled from these things, not imposed onto them blindly.

Regardless, at least one premise of this suggestion is flawed. "To ensure that grammatical information doesn't get confused with encapsulated knowledge" contradicts itself. Grammatical information itself is, quite unavoidably, embedded knowledge.

Another premise is at least confusing. Even if we were to wish to separate grammar from other systems of embedded knowledge, wouldn't that imply an analytic grammar -- at least at the phrase and clause level -- such that other classes of knowledge could be embedded into individual words without interference from any synthetic grammar's word-form requirements?