One way to look at it is this. There was a conscious attempt to make inflected primitives related to their uninflected counterparts, but that's a mnemonic favor, not syntactic requirement.
The analogy is that + is a letter, like "a", and that a letter alone may sometimes be a word, like "a". But that + inflected, like +., is an accented (hence, different) letter and alone might also be a (different but possibly related) word. Inflecting a letter is very different from inflecting a word: a word by definition has meaning, and meanings can be extended (inflected); letters are generally meaningless, and so their "meanings" can not be extended. Of course words are strings of letters, sometimes of length 1, and these words have meanings and can be extended. But just as it makes sense to distinguish the letter "a" (meaningless )from the word "a" (meaningful), it makes sense to distinguish inflecting the letter "a" (meaningless) from inflecting the word "a" (derived from the original meaning). For example, IIRC, in Spanish, the word "an~os" (n with tilde) is very different from the word "anos" (uninflected n) and the meanings are unrelated (and you really don't want to use one where you mean the other). So a meaningless letter was inflected, producing a new meaningless letter, and by implication a new word. But the new word was not a (syntactic) inflection of the old. But this may be extending a analogy too far. Because now we must consider all J primitive words to have one letter at most, with zero or more inflections. This rather loses the vale of the words "letter" and "inflection". -Dan Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device. -----Original Message----- From: bill lam <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:27:47 To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] The role of the . in J words 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. -- regards, ==================================================== GPG key 1024D/4434BAB3 2008-08-24 gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 4434BAB3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
