Re: Wow!  I should look in more often....
Rob Zook 
Fri, 05 Dec 1997 14:44:43 -0600

At 09:53 AM 12/5/97 -0600, Saul wrote:
>From: Joel Peter Anderson <joela*nts,umn,edu>
<snip>
>>I really look forward to the extended vocabulary, and would especially
>>like to get words as fast as possible
>
>As would we, I'm sure. For good or ill, we're taking what may seem a
>comparatively stodgy approach to vocabulary expansion. Other than Rob's
>creation of temporal deixis terms and two coinages on my part, we haven't
>done any and instead focussed on stating the rules that govern words. 

I've been looking over the lexicon and I think my deixis terms seem
superfilous now. The Lexicon has:

th'kya      - I exist*        - no infix  - timeless no beginning or end
th'timuxoi  - I live          - infix mu  - occurs now, no specific end or
                                     
                                            beginning
th'spatsura - I am eating     - infix tsu - occurs now, will continue indef.
th'spaksera - I finish eating - infix kse - occurs now, will end soon
th'kroizo   - I stopped       - infix zo  - occurs in past continues thru 
                                            present
th'spapera  - I have eaten    - infix pe  - past action terminated
th'spadjara - I will eat      - infix dja - future action intended
th'spadjura - I may eat       - infix dju - indeterminate future action

I had come up with the following:

now            'li: (local)
distant past   'le: (past tense non-local)
before now     'la: (past tense local)
after  now     'lu: (future tense local)
distant future 'lo: (future tense non-local)

And in my quote had:

va'num s'at s'thai,  s' kalkal'vna'lu: qa s't'ya

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please"
-- Mark Twain

I'm not so happy with this translation anymore. So I would modify it to:

s'at cta va'num ongo s'kalv,djuna s'deelu

s'-at         cta   va'num  ongo     
you-possesive fact  find    and-sentence conjunctive 

cta   s'-kalv.-dju-na   
you-distort(1)-indeterm. future-distort(2)

s'-deelu
you-like

find your facts and you may distort (equal/as) you like

Where cta replaces my made up word s'thai which one could easily confuse 
with some word "thai" plus the pronoun "you". I also invented a new
conjunctive which allows one to join sentances in the same manner as
"and" in English. 

I would postulate that we could also add, aja - or, sentence conjunctive
to match the existing, uks - but sentence conjunctive.

Then I retained kal'vna, but modified it to kalv,na where the . indicates 
the syllable seperation (we have too many damn ' as it is). 

Finally, I originally extracted what would be a verb root t'ya "like" 
from the word t'hai'la "friend". However, I read in the novelization of
ST:TMP that t'hai'la refers to a friend/brother/lover. Which seems
a more likely action root might have been "lightly join/bond".

So I completely made up the word deelu for "like".

Rob Z.