I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.
I looked up the real example: cadzu means “x1 walks on surface x2 using limbs x3”. I think I see your point. Lambda calculus (and close derivatives, like Haskell) seem to do fine with only unary functions. To be fair, the definition of any word is kind of arbitrary, but it seems more elegant to build these up from smaller pieces.
After studying Iverson’s J (itself an APL derivative), I think one could make a good case for arity-2 verbs taking only a subject and object, with adverbs remaining unary. From briefly skimming parts of a Lojban crash course just now, it appears that the places are usually more regular than you give them credit for. They tend to go in the order subject, object, destination, origin, means, although not all verbs have all of these, which does seem confusing.
I also stumbled across Ithkuil, another conlang which seems to have that terseness quality I was looking for, as well as claiming to be a logical language. But it’s so difficult that nobody speaks it fluently.