Taaluketti

Background

Taaluketti developed from Gaaziketti. It is considered by its creator to be better than Gaaziketti at fulfilling the goals of grammatical generality and flexibility. The below is an outline of the structure of this language at its most general level. It remains to generate a lexicon of morphemes that would enable this structure to be applied to achieving the expressive capabilities of natural language.

Pronunciation and orthography

The following Roman letters are used.

a b c d e g h i k l m n o p q r s t u v z

The vowels are read approximately as in Spanish. But double vowels are pronounced long. Double consonants are pronounced double. Like Finnish.

q is pronounced like the 'ni' in 'onion'.

c is pronounced like the 'ch' is 'chair'.

n when at the end of a word (or medially immediately before 'g' or 'k') is pronounced like the 'ng' is 'song', or else is assimilated to the following consonant, as in Japanese. Elsewhere, it is pronounced like the 'n' in 'sonnet'.

r is rolled

ng is pronounced as in 'finger', not as in 'singer'.

ai is pronounced like 'eye' in 'eye'.

au is pronounced like the 'ow' in 'cow'.

Other sounds are pretty much pronounced as one would expect. But unvoiced stops are not aspirated. E.g. p is pronounced always as in 'spot', never as in 'pack'.

In a word with more than one syllable, the first syllable takes the stress.

Syntax

Parsing markers, modification, functors and phrases

Every word-token (i.e. individual occurrence of a word in a sentence) will take one of four parsing markers:

(null) "leftmost and only argument of its phrase"

-s "leftmost argument, but not only argument, of its phrase"

-n "final argument, but not only argument, of its phrase"

-k "neither the first argument, not the last argument, of its phrase"

Parsing markers are not treated as words – they are “spoken punctuation”. All other morphemes are treated as words except those which are sub-elements of a compound-word. (Compound words are treated as words. Compounds words are strings of morphemes which morphemes, if they were words, would be words of type [Pc] – see below.)

Parsing markers clarify the structure of modification relations within a sentence. Modification is a relationship between one individual word-token, and another.

Each word-token is modified by some number (possibly zero) of other word-tokens. No word-token modifies more than one word-token. No word-token modifies a word-token in another sentence. No word-token modifies itself. No word-token modifies a word-token to its left.

Each word-token is in fact a functor, and the words that modify it are the heads of the phrases which are its arguments.

As functors, word-token always pick up their arguments from their left (the opposite of standard mathematical notation). So suppose you’ve got a chain of word-tokens each (except the first) being modified just by its predecessor. (The only parsing marker punctuating such a chain would be the null marker.) Then you would assume a “((wx)y)z” type of phrasal pattern - i.e. the default is that brackets cluster to the left.

A functor f together with its arguments forms a phrase, and f is said to be the head of that phrase. When a functor modifies some other functor, this means that the phrase of which the modifying functor is the head is an argument of that other functor.

The use of parsing markers to show what modifies what is perhaps best explained as follows. Parsing markers are shown in bold.

The structure of a phrase is like this: (x1, x2, ... xn)y.

Here y is the head of the phrase, and x1, x2, ..., xn are the n different arguments of y.

Suppose n=0. Then we have a phrase of this form: "y".

Suppose n=1. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1 y".

Suppose n=2. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2n y".

Suppose n=3. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3n y".

Suppose n=4. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3k x4n y".

Suppose n=5. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3k x4k x5n y".

Various phrase types

Phrases (including word-tokens, which are themselves phrases) may be classified into types (also called classes). Two basic types are the type [Ap], or adverbial phrase, and the type [S], or statement.

The notation “[x…x>y]” means that an item of the type [x...x>y] is a functor which takes any number of arguments of class x and, together with these arguments, forms a phrase of class y. So the class of the functor itself is [x…x>y]. In other words, if a functor f belongs to the class [x...x>y], any phrase of which it is the head is of the class [y]; and each of its arguments is of the class [x].

Words of the class [Ap…Ap>S] are called “predicate-cores”. We can use the symbol "[Pc]" as an abbreviation for "[Ap…Ap>S]". A predicate-core is a bit like a predicate in Loglan; however, it doesn’t have an order-based place-structure; and it doesn't have a fixed number of arguments. Syntactically speaking, a predicate-core can take any number of arguments (including 0) (even though some combinations of arguments might not make sense semantically speaking). Each of the arguments of a predicate-core will be an adverbial phrase [Ap]. The phrase thus formed will be a statement [S].

There are two kinds of adverbial phrase [Ap]. There are nominative adverbial phrases, which are just noun-phrases [Np]. And there are complex adverbial phrases, which consist of a noun-phrase followed by a postposition. Postpositions are functors which take a single argument of class [Np] and form a phrase of class [Ap], i.e. postpositions are of class [Np>Ap].

A common postposition is ko, which essentially serves to mark the accusative case.

In summary: any noun-phrase is an adverbial phrase. And any phrase consisting of a single noun-phrase modifying a postposition is an adverbial phrase.

To make noun-phrases [Np], you’ve got a bunch of what are called noun-heads [Nh]. The commonest noun-head is le, meaning – roughly – "the". A phrase of the form "Y le" ("Y" being some phrase that is an argument of le) is a noun-phrase [Np], meaning "the (single) person/object x such that "x Y" would be a true sentence", i.e. "the x which satisfies "Y" ". If many Ys each modify le, then le picks out the single x that satisfies all of those Ys.

Example phrases

Here are some example phrases (some of which are complete sentences), written first with the parsing markers, and then with brackets instead of parsing markers, in order to show the grammatical structure – the brackets surround a bunch of phrases each of which is an argument of the functor just after the brackets.

haara le <> the (one that is a) woman

(haara)le

hecci le <> the one that climbs

(hecci)le

heccis haaran le <> the one that both climbs and is a woman; the woman that climbs

(hecci.haara)le

ko hecci le <> the one that is climbed

((ko)hecci)le

Gaazi le ko hecci. <> The hill is climbed.

(((gaazi)le)ko)hecci

Haara le hecci. <> The woman climbs.

((haara)le)hecci

gaazi le ko hecci le <> the one that climbs the hill

((((gaazi)le)ko)hecci)le

Haara les gaazi le kon hecci. <> The woman climbs the hill.

((haara)le.((gaazi)le)ko)hecci

gaazi le ko heccis haaran le <> the woman that climbs the hill

((((gaazi)le)ko)hecci.haara)le

kos haara len heccis gaazin le <> the hill which the woman climbs

((ko.(haara)le)hecci.gaazi)le

Hecci le haara. <> The one that climbs is a woman.

((hecci)le)haara

kos hecci len heccis gaazin le <> the hill which the one that climbs climbs

((ko.(hecci)le)hecci.gaazi)le

kos haara len hecci le <> the one which the woman climbs

((ko.(haara)le)hecci)le