Archive:Terminator

Not to be confused with Terminator.

A terminator is a particle that carries no meaning whose purpose is to show where a phrase of a certain kind ends. Some particles, like po, mı, , open phrase – for example, po expects a noun phrase to immediately follow, and opens a full “nested sentence”. And sometimes it is necessary to specify where that phrase ends, for unambiguity’s sake.

A common example: po phrases

Say we wanted to translate “a cat’s claw” to Toaq. “A cat’s” would be po baq kảto. “Claw” is choıceaq. So our first idea would be to put one right next to the other like an adjective, forming a serial:

*po baq kảto chỏıceaq
a cat-claw’s [something]

But this is incorrect because the noun phrase that po expects to fit in its bellows never ends! So baq kảto chỏıceaq ends up forming one noun phrase, meaning “a cat-claw” (something that is a cat and a claw at the same time 🤔). In this case we need to signal that kảto needs to go inside po, whereas chỏıbeaq needs to stay outside of it. This is where terminators come into play: ga, the terminator for po, serves as a fence guarding the content (the noun phrase) inside from the content (rest of serial verb) outside:

po baq kảto ga chỏıceaq
a cat’s claw

(Green marks the extent of the po-phrase – so in a sense, ga cuts it short.)

Skippable terminators

Some terminators are skippable (also known as elidable/elidible or omissible in loglanging circles) – they don’t need to appear every time the corresponding particle appears. po’s ga is an example of such a terminator. For example, while it is perfectly fine to say

Pỏ jí ga ní rủa da.
This flower is mine.

we can safely remove the ga without any repercussions:

Pỏ jí ní rủa da.

This is because after we see jí, a complete noun phrase, we encounter ní rủa – yet another noun phrase – which can’t possibly fit inside the po-phrase because po only ever asked for one noun phrase. This is different from the last example because chỏıbeaq could expand the baq kảto noun phrase by forming the serial verb kảto chỏıbeaq. It follows that ní rủa has to stay outside of the po-phrase, which ends prematurely.

Other terminators are always expected to be there, for example kıo’s kı. The two are used for parenthetical statements (kıo like this one! kı) and it wouldn’t make sense to allow the kı to be skipped (elided).

Some phrases don’t need terminators at all – for example, ju (which opens a parenthetical statement) ends as soon as the statement (a full sentence) ends (with an illocution like da). In this case we could also consider da as terminators of ju (that depends on whether you require terminators not to carry any meaning but be purely structural).

How to learn these?

There are two schools of thought on how to teach terminators, and both are equally valid (but it’s hard to say which one is “better”):

1. Pretend every particle that has a terminator, skippable or not, intrinsically implies that terminator being there – for example, we would say that the grammatical structure for possessives is not po ___ but po ___ ga. Then specify that some of these terminators may be skipped under some circumstances.
2. Don’t include terminators in the definitions of grammatical structures. Warn whenever one phrase bleeds into another (and introduce terminators as a stopgap mechanism for such occasions).

With (1) learners end up terminating too much; with (2), too little. (1) does not cause ungrammaticalities, but introduces yet another delay for the learner to produce sentences in the language as it is actually spoken (and spoken Toaq is not replete in terminators, which are in general avoided; see below section). (2) does engender ungrammatical productions, and also causes nuisance down the line as terminators are not easy to explain, but gets the learner much closer to actual Toaq 90% of the time.

Attitudes towards terminators

The practice of having constructs come in starter–terminator pairs like po–ga to aid in unambiguity has a precedent in Lojban. However, Lojban’s terminators are much more essential and commonplace since it has a much more nested and Byzantine structure, whereas Toaq is relatively flat.

Hoemaı considers terminators a necessary evil as they are not easy to codify in formal syntax terms, or at least come with a lot of useless syntax: a terminated phrase like po ___ ga ___ requires two heads, one for the po (which is semantically bearing), one for the ga (which is semantically vacuous):

pỏ jí ga tỏa my words

				VP
			╱ CopVFP			╲ V
	╱ CopVP			╲ CopVF		△ tỏa
╱ CopV		╲ DP		│ ga
│ pỏ		△ jí

(Note: some internal CopVP structure was omitted for brevity.) X_FP is an arbitrary convention for a phrase that terminates XP; see this issue on the zugaı issue tracker for a deeper scoop.

In fact it would not be far-fetched to remove terminators from a future version of Toaq in their entirety. This quote due to And Rosta:

I agree both that spoken parentheses (as they are described and conceptualized by the loglangs that employ them) are unnatural and that they can be reconceptualized as something more natural. What's less redeemable, I think, is the unnaturalness of the conditions on the so-called elidability of the terminators. As a loglanger I should hardly carp at unnaturalness, but I would at least want the conditions to be explicitly specified and demonstrated to be ergonomic. My introspective sense is that it's easy enough to insert/unelide terminators at a kind of editing and proofreading stage, a stage at which you tweak the text to avoid misparses by the reader, but not at the first stage of composition, nor easy to formulate the rules of elidability.

Avoiding terminators altogether

It usually suffices to place heavy constituents on the far right of a sentence, corroborating Toaq’s right-branching syntax, and if necessary move any interlopers to the topic (which is terminated by bı – but this terminator usage is fine because a topic phrase is not introduced by any particle). Here’s an example of these repair strategies in use:

Cả rôq nháo cy rôq mao jí da.
That they cried made me cry too. (Ugly: there is a heavy constituent rôq nháo (cy) on the left. We need to make do with a terminator, plus the sentence is much less nice to read.)
↓
Rôq nháo bı, cả róu rôq mao jí da.
As for them crying, it caused me to cry too. (Much nicer, if longer.)
Rỏq nháo cà rôq mao jí da.
They cried, causing me to cry too. (Short and sweet, but we’ve had to pay the cost of changing the meaning of the sentence.)

Mảı pó pó jíbo pỉa ga pảı ga sẻo sa mẻaheo da.
My sibling’s friend’s spouse loves somebody else. (😖 Terminators galore!)
↓
Pó jíbo pỉa ga pảı bı, mảı zébo sẻo sa mẻaheo da.
As for my sibling’s friend, their spouse loves somebody else. (Better, and an actual repair strategy used in natural languages when the nesting becomes insufferable, but we’ve still not gotten rid of ga.)
Séo pö páı pö jíbo pỉa bı, mảı séo sa mẻaheo da.
As for the spouse of the friend of my sibling, they love somebody else. (We still do copious nesting, but at least bı is there to take it all down. If this sort of noun phrase appeared in the middle of the sentence, like Mảı séo pö páı pö jíbo pỉa cy cy sa mẻaheo da, we’d be back at cascading terminators like the cy cy here. So best to keep this sort of nesting in the topic, where it’s easiest and most natural to annul.)
Jíbo pỉa hóbo pảı hóbo sẻo bı, mảı hó sa mẻaheo da.
As for my friend, as for their friend, as for their sibling, they love somebody else. (Long but very easy to follow.)

The takeaway: prefer short and simple sentences to long and convoluted ones. Sometimes it’s best to distribute the information over multiple sentences (like in Modern Greek) rather than try to pack them into one large one. And if you need to right-branch early, bı is your friend.

List of terminators

Skippable

Structure	Terminator	Example (underline shows how far the phrase extends)
		Without terminator	With terminator
po	ga	pỏ súq nỉaı you, an animal’s	pỏ súq ga nỉaı your animal
mı	ga (unofficially, ceı)	mỉ mỉao kảto “Moon-Cat”	mỉ mỉao ga kảto “Moon” the cat
lu	ky	Mảı jí sa lủ mảı hóa fúy da I love somebody who loves me	Lủ mảı hóa jí ky nháo da They are such that I love them
clause ( or )	cy	Dảı rûaq jí róu da It’s possible that I state it	Dảı rûaq jí cy róu da Given this, it’s possible that I state

Apart from all these, hu, which are used for vocatives, are sometimes understood as terminated with ga. However this would seem unnecessary as hu are commonly used between sentences, in which case you may use lả, e.g., hu káto lả chủq súq ba O cat, you should eat!.

Non-skippable

Structure	Starts with	Ends with	An example just for you
full-text quote	mo	teo	Kủq nháo mó «Mảı jí súq da» teo da. They said, “I love you”.
parenthetical statement	kıo	kı	Mả tỉjuı súq moq? (kıo ỉq jí da kı) Are you close by? (I am)
topic	(start of clause)	bı	lâ seku bủ bı, chỉ bủ jí …that as for most false things, I deem them false
incidental statement	ju	da	Gảı jí sa rủa da, ju kủao máq da I saw a flower, which was green.