dabanese, 2

As of the moment, I don't have any dabanese software nor graphics. Thus in this sequence of posts I will use dabanese pigeon ideograms. Potentially, any concatenation of unicode symbols which does not include any white space, and which is not one of the single symbols ( ) { } [ ], can possibly serve as a pigeon ideogram. We already have two pigeon ideograms: () and {} — they stand for "nothingness". I will also use English and Polish nouns, mathematical symbols, etc. It goes without saying that pigeon ideograms, and dabanese characters in general, have to be separated in a dabanese phrase by white spaces, when rendered without graphics (once we have graphics, each ideogram will reside in its own distinct rectangle).

Consider the following two dabaphrases:

{ coldness [ water ] }

{ [ coldness ] water }

Due to the different emphasis, the first phrase means "cold water", while the second one — "water-like coldness". Indeed, the emphasis tells you what the phrase is about. The first one is about water, the second one about coldness.

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In this dabaseries of notes I will deal mainly with the strict dabanese. In the day to day communication the unordered phrases (meaningful more so than lists) will be the most common. Thus it is convenient to introduce a practical shortcut: it is allowed to remove the external braces of the unordered phrase just inside the emphasis brackets, e.g. phrase

{ John [ { mother father } ] }

can be simplified to:

{ John [ mother father ] }

Here the emphasized subphrase is an unordered list. Most likely this phrase means "John's mother and father". By the way, the latter English phrase is slightly ambigous to those who don't know English well; to them it may mean "John's mother and someone's father" (or John's mother and a priest). In general, parsing of the natural languages is not unique while it is always unique for dabanese (which is a trivial theorem).

Polish noun for "movement" is short "ruch" (approximately pronounced roogh). Let's use it as a daba pigeon ideogram:

{ { [ ruch ] { foot foot } } [ Mary ] }

{ { [ North [ ruch ] ] { foot Friday } } [ Mary ] }

Yes, good graphics would help us a lot to parse dabanese phrases. Anyway, both phrases are about Mary ("Mary" is emphasized). The first phrase tells us that she is moving her feet (most likely her own, that's a natural default). Perhaps she's walking or running, or possibly she's sitting or even lying down and swinging her feet. More detailed meaning depends on the context (on other phrases of the longer text).

The second phrase is a bit more specific. It is concerned with a Mary, who is walking or running toward North on Friday (or on Fridays). Possibly she jogs to her friend most every Friday (and gets a ride home Saturday morning, who knows). To interpret this phrase as a one-foot movement wouild be possible but rather silly. As in natural languages, we get a lot of room for interpretation, and we rely on the common sense (not always succesfully).

One more example. Let =/= be the ideogram standing for "not equal". Let's also use Yr for "year". Then (we will use two lines to write one more complex phrase):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ John ] }
            [ =/= ]  }

is a way (perhaps clumsy) of saying that John from the year 2002 and from the 2007 year is not the same, that perhaps he has changed, or perhaps the phrase informs us that there are two different Johns. We may switch the emphasis from the change in John to John himself (this time there will be the same John, unless a symbolic John is meant, a John of all Johns):

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] }  { { 2007 [ Yr ] }  [ =/= ] }  [ John ]  }

or more specifically:

{  { { 2002 [ Yr ] } { 2007 [ Yr ] } [ =/= ] }
            [ politics [ John ] ]  }

Now we are informed that John has changed politically between years 2002 and 2007 — possibly his views have changed, or his political affiliations, or ....