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RE: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism



pc:
> a.rosta@lycos.co.uk writes:
> <<
> Technically, the BNF 'grammar' is more like a grammaticality-checker
> than a true grammar. That is, it will tell you whether or not a
> string is well-formed Lojban, but it won't tell you what it means.
> >>
> though I shouldn't say so, this is a hairsplitting technicality in 
> this discussion. OK, The BNF 'grammmar' (but isn't it in fact the 
> yacced grammar) is the final authority on syntax. The further move 
> to connection with meaning -- something which exists for no langauge 
> that I know of (including machine languages) -- is what jboske is 
> largely about. And making that move is greatly aided by having the 
> syntax fixed (and the vocab, too, of course). 

What you say is reasonable enough.

But I think you'd be hard pressed to find a 'grammar' or syntactic
description of a natural language that does not take into account
meaning, and as syntactic theory matures, syntax and semantics
increasingly merge into the same thing. So from a syntactician's
point of view, the Lojban formal grammar is vacuous -- so what
if the grammar rules some strings out and some strings in, and
assigns such and such a structure to those strings? Unless the
ruled-in strings are assigned meanings, and unless the syntactic
structures assigned to them are also meaningful, they are empty
artefacts of the analysis, not part of the language-grammar
(that maps between sentence sounds and sentence meanings).
Put it this way: if a linguist came along to do fieldwork on
Lojban (and didn't have access to the blueprint documents), they
would not come up with anything resembling the formal grammar,
and if you then showed them the formal grammar they would find
it very valuable.

I know you disagree with some of this, because we've discussed it
before. All I can say is I'm a syntactician, and with an open
mind I'm trying to call it how I see it.

--And.