=============================================================== Nancy's comments: >------- rolemy and relmy essentially the same? Maybe there should be words (not necessarily rel and role) distinguishing betweeen chosen and unchosen relationships. >8. class of: classmy species This looks handy. How would you handle the statement (which is true so far as I know) "This century, twice as many people have been killed by their own governments as in war"? I would prefer not to say that governments own their people, but there doesn't seem to be an idiomatic way around it. If we give up on being idiomatic, maybe a new form could convey the idea that the government has claimed ownership, but I don't agree. Would there need to be two slots for variables once you describe ownership (or anything else) as "so-called", one for who's doing the calling, and the other for the one who's denying it? Is IU used for all personal pronouns? One variant for pronouns that I'd like to see is a modifier to indicate degree of group inclusion. I'm not comfortable describing women as "we" (I don't feel that strong a connection with women in general) or as "they" (I'm one of them). >pronouns, for example, "them-yucky". That sounds me-valuable. Does this only apply to adjectives of valuation, or to adjectives in general? (I'm reminded of a fairly acrimonious argument about just how hot some hot-and-sour soup was--it turned out that people had gotten bowls of wildly different spiceyness.) >PLURALS: [...] There are two more plural forms I'd like, all-by-nature and none-by- nature: Circles are all-by-nature round. (People might be pretty cautious about using the by-nature forms in anything but math.) >GRAMMAR EXAMPLE: >It is ungrammatical to say "Blacks are bad" for three reasons: >1) The plural in this case is ambiguous; it could mean "all >blacks" and it at least means "some blacks". Would the unadorned "blacks" exist in NE? Should there be something to indicate that "blacks" are an invented subgroup? >her-tasty, us-yucky, and so on. This reminds me of something I've liked from Russ's _How to Suppress Women's Writing_. She says that whenever someone talks about "good literature", it's important to ask who it's good for, and for what. >English or the German equivalent. That meseems to take a lot of the edge off. You mention a rheomode. How would it work? >property their people." In other words, "seeming to them that they have >their people as property." How do you like that? I don't--maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with NE, but it seems ugly. Also, I think that the second "their" is redundant. Wouldn't "them- theirproperty people" do the job? This sounds like it might be a place for 1.5 person pronouns. :-) >Yeah, you could think of it as a 2.5th-person pronoun. Good point! Let's >invent one! Put all pronoun persons on a continuum? Maybe it just needs the habit of indicating the limits of one's experience. "This bowl of hot-and-sour soup meseems pretty hot" rather than "The hot-and-sour soup meseems pretty hot." On the other hand, "The spoonfuls of hot-and-sour soup I've drunk so far meseems pretty hot" meseems unnecessarily finicky--this could be a reason for handling this sort of precision semantically. >Great idea, but what does a 2.73-person pronoun represent? Perhaps we should >start with the x.5-person pronouns first. I'm not sure how many significant digits you can get, but having a continuum makes it easier to express ideas like being almost part of a group. Maybe it should be a qualitative continuum instead of a numerical one. The real problem I see is that 2nd person isn't halfway between 1st and 3rd. =================================================== More Ron comments: >Maybe there should be words (not necessarily rel and role) distinguishing >betweeen chosen and unchosen relationships. That might prove a useful distinction. Anyone have any suggestions on how to work this? >This looks handy. How would you handle the statement (which is true >so far as I know) "This century, twice as many people have been >killed by their own governments as in war"? Seems like a good question. I don't really know. Neither "rolemy," "relmy," nor "classmy" really captures the connotations of that sentence. Perhaps your suggestion on an unwanted-relationship particle could help out here. Thinking it over, "role" seems a little too narrow. Perhaps New E could use "rel" or "relationship" to cover both friends and countries and use "fam" or "family" to cover uncles and sisters. Anyone? >I would prefer not to say that governments own their people, but >there doesn't seem to be an idiomatic way around it. If we give >up on being idiomatic, maybe a new form could convey the idea >that the government has claimed ownership, but I don't agree. Well, it seems to me one could express this by "them-owntheir people" or, in a variation of the nomenclature I suggested earlier to alleviate uneuphoniousness (an uneuphonious word, that), something like "them-their property their people." In other words, "seeming to them that they have their people as property." How do you like that? >Would there need to be two slots for variables once you describe >ownership (or anything else) as "so-called", one for who's doing >the calling, and the other for the one who's denying it? Whoops, I didn't notice this passage until I wrote the paragraph above. Yep, it seems likely, and the paragraph above seems like the way to do it. >>PRONOUNS: >>IU = parallel synchronistic derivation from i+u (Eng. I+you) and >>Esperanto iu (someone); pronoun for the Mind >>i = I >>u = you > >Is IU used for all personal pronouns? Nope; my metaphysical baggage checks in here. I suggested "IU" as a way for mystics-solipsists to refer to the Mind that they (and I, as it happens) underlies human experience and lower-case minds. In other words, "it" "is" neither "I" nor "you." Sorry for all the quotes there, but mystical experience demands them. >That sounds me-valuable. Does this only apply to adjectives of valuation, >or to adjectives in general? (I'm reminded of a fairly acrimonious >argument about just how hot some hot-and-sour soup was--it turned >out that people had gotten bowls of wildly different spiceyness.) I haven't thought this out completely; it seems to me that New E needs some specific "grammatical" rules for this to avoid the sort of vagueness that allows people to put one over on one another. We've seen the application of this rule to possessives above. Ideas, anyone? Should New E require adjectival direction in all cases? It seems as if this could lead to an infinite regress (me-them-me-them-me-them-me-yucky). >This reminds me of something I've liked from Russ's _How to >Suppress Women's Writing_. She says that whenever someone talks >about "good literature", it's important to ask who it's good >for, and for what. Quite so. Methinks the Conspiracy(TM) has suppressed many cultures' art this way. >>Thus, the sentence "Blacks are bad" becomes something like >>"Sombunall blacks meseem me-harmful", a sentence which lays bare >>the agenda of the speaker. Imho, Hitler probably could not have >>become ruler of grouphis country if he had spoken grammatical New >>English or the German equivalent. > >That meseems to take a lot of the edge off. You see that as good, right? I do. >You mention a rheomode. >How would it work? I don't understand it fully myself, but what I understand I like. For the moment I'll just point you toward David Bohm's book _Wholeness and the Implicate Order_, where he (I think originally) describes it. I'll try to go into more detail later. >I don't--maybe it's just my unfamiliarity with NE, but it seems ugly. >Also, I think that the second "their" is redundant. Wouldn't "them- >theirproperty people" do the job? I intended the new construct to more closely resemble idiomatic English, in response to the complaint that the former construct fell heavily on the ear. For example, "I went to visit my relation my sister" seems close to grammatical to me, while "I went to visit relmy sister" does not. Does anyone else prefer one construct over the other? >This sounds like it might be a place for 1.5 person pronouns. :-) Good point. Actually, I intended IU as a kind of zeroth-person pronoun (i.e. more basic than 1, 2, or 3, but in a certain way partaking of them all). A 1.5-person pronoun seems more likely something like a we-inclusive. We-inclusive and we-exclusive seem like good additions to the language. >Maybe it just needs the habit of indicating the limits of one's >experience. "This bowl of hot-and-sour soup meseems pretty hot" >rather than "The hot-and-sour soup meseems pretty hot." On >the other hand, "The spoonfuls of hot-and-sour soup I've >drunk so far meseems pretty hot" meseems unnecessarily >finicky--this could be a reason for handling this sort >of precision semantically. Well, the principle meseems to hard-wire the habits of qualifying one's speech carefully into the language. As Richard K. pointed out, one can replace E' in general with a sense of caution (what Korzybski called "the semantic pause," I think), but I want to make the syntactic/grammatical rules into little semantic alarm clocks that make it necessary, rather than optional, to take the semantic pause that refreshes. A couple of rules off the top of my head: one should indicate "direction" toward oneself at some point in the sentence, but if you have "meseems" in the sentence (or a similar construct), you needn't terminate adjectives in the sentence with a "me-" on the left. In other words, The soup meseems hot. and The soup meseems them-hot. would work fine, but * The soup meseems me-hot. and * The soup meseems me-them-hot. we should avoid as overqualified, unless the conversation centers around epistemology. (See Raymond Smullyan's dialogue about the crazy "experimental epistemologist" for this one.) >Maybe oratory could be tranlated into NE, but the statements would seem >blatently crude and ill-formed. That meseems the whole idea; we want semantically unsound statements to stick out badly. I admit that New E limits oratorical speech -- or rather demagogic speech -- but that meseems part of the plan. Now, it may happen that in excluding demagogic speech, we also exclude poetry, but again, I do not propose New E as a primary language, merely one useful in certain situations, such as trying to make oneself understood, and in debates. Ron H-E