Glossary

This page gives an overview of Toaq-specific jargon, or logic jargon as it relates to Toaq.

Auto-hoa

A family of proposals for automatically inserting hoa into a relative clause. None has been settled on (as of 2021), but you can compare the candidate proposals here.

Contentive

Any Toaq word that isn't a special grammar particle.

Exhibitor slots

A proposed kind of predicate slot with special serial behavior. Written e in signatures.

Semantically, this slot is filled with a concrete (c) value, but it participates in serial merges sort of like a 1.

For example: if muoq (___ is made of ___) is taken to be c e, then muoq peq is “___ is made of paper”.

This would shrink wordy constructs like sa mủoq sü hóa baq pẻq down to just sa mủoq pẻq, and thus partially solve the “Toaq doesn’t have a word like Lojban be” problem.

Frame

A family of words, all having the same signature. Each frame is named after a familiar word in the frame.

See mı Hỏaqgīo’s list of predicate frames for a list of all major frames. (2021 note; this is supposed to get trimmed down a lot in the future.)

Great Root Expansion (GRE)

A 2019 phonology proposal (link).

New Segmentation (Newseg)

A 2020 proposal for a change to the tone system. http://toaq.org/Tones.pdf

Opaque

1. Of a grammar constructs like po X: meaning quantifiers on the inside don't leak out of it into the main prenex.
2. Of compound words like nıefā: meaning that you can't technically figure out the meaning just by applying rules to the parts; you have to look it up in a dictionary to be sure. But of course there are a lot of useful patterns. The decomposition into nıe and fa can be considered an etymology or a mnemonic, but there's no "transparent" process that determines its meaning.

Small Grammar Update (SGU)

An often-quoted 2020 Discord message announcing a grammar update. https://discord.com/channels/311223912044167168/311223912044167168/726562475012522096

A small update on the grammar: I have decided to simplify adverbials. Together with my recent conclusion that Toaq does (or should) have a TP, this solves all the previously unsolvable problems.

What this means is that there will simply be two types of adverbs, depending on where they attach. For now, the low-attaching adverbials are those formed with :t6: and :t7: , while the high-attaching ones need a non-tonal head (ıq, for instance). Low adverbs have lower scope than quantifiers and they don’t scope over each other. High adverbs work like the old adverbs. The placement of all adverbials is also simplified so that low adverbs (x) must appear either right after the verb or after the arguments (V x SO x), while high adverbs (y) are sentence-final but can be moved to be prenex (y bı V S O y).

I also looked into the possibility of merging :t6: and :t7: so that one of them could be used for high adverbs instead, but this isn’t possible without introducing a terminator, as far as I can tell (let me know if you can think of another solution).

In any case, this would put the overall progress at 90+%, so I’m going with that instead of the frustrating-to-formalize (and hard-to-use) status quo.

It has since been announced that there will be no actual word like “ıq”, and maybe no high adverbs at all (instead you just serialize them into the main verb, or make them the main verb).

Universe of discourse (UoD)

The set of things under discussion at a given time. Quantifiers range over this domain, so that tu poq doesn't necessarily mean "all of the people in the world". See Wikipedia.