Sa ea burıaq (A sweeping proposal for a possible new version of Toaq)

https://robin.town/blog/sa-ea-buriaq

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This has been pretty controversial so far, I assume? What has the discussion been like on it? I'm not present in the Toaq Discord, so please fill me in! (and I don't plan to be for a while... I still have to make an apology)

I'll be giving a live commentary of what I think about each section as I read it, and then a final thoughts section. I'll post the whole thing when I'm done.

Oddly enough, no! The overwhelming consensus is that this is a very well-thought-out reform, even if it breaks with precedent in several areas. Probably the big controversy is the fact that Toaq Delta is supposed to be the stable "final" version and adopting Eatoaq (as this set of reforms is now called) would be yet another change.

For this reason, @TheAndSys has advocated for a separate area to give Eatoaq a shakedown before the community widely adopts it, to make sure the proposal is as solid as it seems on the surface. Hastily adopting Eatoaq "just to immediately make the next greek letter" would arguably be the worst outcome, just because it completely breaks the promise of stability that came with Delta.

A lot of the discussion has been Q&As, really. Often things like "how do you do [Delta grammatical construction]". The proposal should be read conservatively, and if it doesn't directly address a specific grammatical feature, you can safely assume it's the same as in Delta; and even if it does, oftentimes you can still use the Delta construction (e.g. you can still explicitly mark proper names with «mı»).

Scope manipulation is undoubtedly the most unusual feature of the proposal. The new «nâ», and «báq» being able to scope outside of a sentence in some contexts, is pretty mind-blowing.

Hoemaı also commented on the proposal, and they do have qualms about subordinate clause extraposition (because it feels weird, not because it's actually problematic) and the new tone system, but think it's great otherwise.

There's also been efforts to use this proposal conversationally; while there are some speedbumps with all the new grammatical mechanisms, it's pretty clear from my reading of other people's messages, and my own attempts at writing in it, that Eatoaq has so much expressive potential by how much more you can move things around (Sentence fragments! Pendent nâ! Discursive phrases!) and the general fixing of gotchas like donkey anaphora.

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