From xod@thestonecutters.net Sat Feb 28 12:29:22 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:43:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from thestonecutters.net ([63.251.19.112] helo=chert.thestonecutters.net) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1AxB5O-0000Ug-1P for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sat, 28 Feb 2004 12:29:22 -0800 Received: from thestonecutters.net (adsl-98-61.bway.net [216.220.98.61]) by chert.thestonecutters.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E83E148005 for ; Sat, 28 Feb 2004 14:56:44 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <4040F3CB.5030503@thestonecutters.net> Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 15:02:19 -0500 From: xod User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031013 Thunderbird/0.3 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: (no subject) References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-archive-position: 546 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: xod@thestonecutters.net Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners melissa@fastanimals.com wrote: >On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Robin Lee Powell wrote: > > > >>On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 02:35:50PM -0600, melissa@fastanimals.com wrote: >> >> >>>These syntactically senseless sentences are possible in English and >>>Spanish, and I seem to recall that they're possible in Swahili as well >>>(although my Swahili is quite rusty). I suspect that they are >>>possible in any natural language. >>> >>> >>I think you're confused about the word 'possible'. >> >> > >No, I'm not confused about the meaning of a simple and common word in my >native language. I'm neither an idiot nor an ignoramus. > > If a sentence is "syntactically senseless", in what sense is it "possible" in any language? It's "possible" to string any bunch of characters together, as has already been said, but "possible" in the context of a language generally means "syntactically valid". "Green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of a sentence which is in fact syntactically valid, but semantically meaningless. Such sentences are possible in Lojban too: lo crino sidbo cu vlile sipna -- "The war was supposed to be quick. We were supposed to be greeted as liberators. It was to pay for itself with oil revenues. And we were supposed to find chemical and biological weapons." Col. Sam Gardiner USAF-retired, National Defense University