Glossary

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

Auto-hóa

A family of proposals for automatically inserting hóa into a relative clause. See the dedicated page.

Contentive

A word that carries meaning rather than function, unlike particles. In Toaq, this term has been superseded by the much more beginner-friendly sounding verb, or predicate.

Donkey

See Donkey sentence.

Exhibitor slots

An old-school way to say "genitival serialization" (the "merge-with-baq" behavior).

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 taken to be c e, then muoq pẻq 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 Hoaqgio’s list of predicate frames for a list of all major frames as of 2021. The new list is much slimmer; viz. Frame#Table of serial frames.

Great Root Expansion (GRE)

A 2019 phonology update.

JJ

Jìe jí, "in my opinion".

New Segmentation (Newseg)

A 2020 proposal for a change to the tone system. This was superseded by the segmentation system as laid out in the reference grammar (look under ‘Word segmentation via tones’ here).

Opaque

1. Of a grammar construct 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.

   In linguistics, these kinds of compounds are known as derivational (vs. compositional) or exocentric (vs. endocentric) compounds.

Small Grammar Update (SGU)

A modification the way adverbs work and where they can be placed. Only partially implemented; see Small Grammar Update#Current status.

t2, t3, t4…

The second, third, fourth… tone.

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.