tergerna zei jarco

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Introduction

The general idea is to make a visual way of representing the bridi structure which makes it easy to grok. The structure itself is represented with this tree-ish thing which highlights the terbri and their relationship to the main selbri. The visual structuring only applies to the top-level bridi; abstractions are just one unit. Not all grammar classes need unique shapes, just enough to make the structure clear.

The final goal is to make a front-end for camxes which can display any bridi this way. This is to aid in the reading of advanced text with large, complicated, or place mangled sentences, or just to explore structures of the grammar in an intuitive way.

Optionally we can colour the individual terms based on their ‘type’, given some kind of type system like (but not necessarily the same as) the one described by Tsani. (I don’t know if camxes can do that or not.) Also it might be interesting to color the tag shapes as well based on the type of their expected sumti, as given by their gismu definition.

This idea is still under active development. Feedback, criticism and ideas are welcomed.

Planning

References

  • tsani’s Type System
  • zo soi pe la selpa’i

Explanation of Shapes

https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1W8wmu97LLVvAQQPTGWOB9-zV3gXaSF0-U2etQJeyV4M/pub?w=349&h=374

Sumti

Anything with a line underneath is considered a sumti by the main bridi, atomic or otherwise.

Selbri

Solid box. Only the main, top-level selbri gets this.

Tags

Bubble. All sumti go somewhere, whether the tag-word exists explicitly or not. Automatically implied tag bubbles have dotted outline. Explicitly specified, or additional (BAI, etc) tag bubbles have solid outline.

Connectors

Pointy-box. Should have lines that touch the selbri of each conjoined bridi. In orderless layout it might be interesting to have two bridi back-to-back, but not sure how this works if there’s more than two.

Auxiliary

Parallel bars. Auxiliaries are usually relative clauses like with {poi}, {noi} and new-{soi}, but I'm considering using it in sort of a reverse way as well to demonstrate {zo'u}. We'll see how it works out.

Annotations

Bits of speech which don’t change the structure of the bridi but which are still important to it’s meaning. Covers UI, NOI and SEI, and probably TO, and possibly new-soi (note: ask selpahi about scope). Has no shape. Because these things have a well-defined scope, they will go next to their sumti in the orderless view, or next to the selbri if they have whole-bridi scope. In-order version might need over-under umbrellas to jarco their scope.

Vestigial

Terminators and things like {cu} are weird here. They serve to make the bridi structure unambiguous but here we are doing it visually. In the orderless presentation these can be totally deleted, but in the order-preserving version, throwing them away will make it harder to understand the visual form’s relationship to the input text. Vestigials have no box and have greyed-out text, showing where in the input the word was for reference. Note this coloring is strictly different from the type-system coloring which conflates but I think that’s ok.

Examples needed

  • Type casting with LAhE (re-read tsani’s pages probably)
  • What to do with {zo’u}? It’s a weird one. Are there more like it?
  • What to do with {xu} and {xukau}? Are they annotations? Auxiliaries?
  • Do we want to support selbri-less constructions? It might be useful to dig into complicated descriptions, there's lots of ways to build single sumti out to the size of large sentences, especially with abstractors. We should be able to pop in and out of nested constructs.

Stuff we don’t care about

  • Sumti connectives - this just makes a bigger, fatter sumti. What can be different about a sumti it it’s type, not it’s internal structure.
  • Tanru connectives - tanru, including connectives and inversions, just go into a bigger selbri box.
  • {be} isn’t relevant at the bridi level cos it just makes longer sumti.