bill lam-2 wrote:
>
> mer, 13 Jan 2010, Sherlock Ric skribis:
>> > From: Tracy Harms
>> >
>> > I think of inflections as occurring to the right of characters other
>> > than whitespace. I consider null, newline, and tab to be whitespace,
>> > along with the space character. I don't see the count of characters as
>> > significant. Longer primaries such as ( {:: ) are not subordinate.
>>
>> This is a nice and simple way of thinking of it. In other words the
>> primitives ( p.. ) and ( {:: ) have a double inflection.
>
> I think the role of . and : in p. {:: are word formation but not
> inflection. If it is a inflection as in human language, the new
> word should be a derivative of the root. eg,
>
> think -> think-able
> friend -> friend-ly
>
> so that the speaker who know the root can understand the meaning of
> the derivative without consulting a dictionary, but this is not the
> case of J primitive.
>
Tracy is talking about syntax, and you about semantics, and I think
there is more similarity of what you're saying to what she said than
it may seem:
Syntax level:
{ is a token -> {: is a token obtained by inflection -> {:. is a token
obtained by (yet another) inflection
Now a syntax checker/highlighter recognizes/paints first two tokens as verbs
and the 3rd one also as a token, albeit undefined (in contradistinction to,
say, {::).
Semantic level:
friend -> friend-ly -> friend-ly-ly
Here a reader recognizes meaning of the inflection friendly as being derived
from
the root, just as you said, and the word friendlyly also as a word, albeit
silly (in
contradistinction to, say, friendliness.)
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