From archibal@fresco.Math.McGill.CA Sun Mar 28 13:34:07 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:34:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from fresco.math.mcgill.ca ([132.206.150.41]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.30) id 1B7hux-0005vw-0r for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sun, 28 Mar 2004 13:34:07 -0800 Received: (from archibal@localhost) by fresco.Math.McGill.CA (8.11.6/8.11.6) id i2SLXtZ31589 for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Sun, 28 Mar 2004 16:33:55 -0500 Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 16:33:55 -0500 From: Andrew Archibald To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: lojban qua lingua franca Message-ID: <20040328163355.H31434@fresco.Math.McGill.CA> References: <18b3f2187d4a.187d4a18b3f2@imap.epfl.ch> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5.1i In-Reply-To: <18b3f2187d4a.187d4a18b3f2@imap.epfl.ch>; from gregory.dyke@epfl.ch on Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 09:03:55PM +0100 X-archive-position: 628 X-Approved-By: archibal@math.mcgill.ca 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: archibal@math.mcgill.ca Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Sun, Mar 28, 2004 at 09:03:55PM +0100, GREGORY DYKE wrote: > > Curiouser and curiouser said > > > > Explain to me slowly the difference between to grasp and to learn > > from the point of view of lojban grammar. > > (btw, there was "t" too many in my previous mail... I meant that it's not as easy to grasp as it is to learn once the basics are grasped) Hmm. Perhaps you were using "grasp" to mean "understand the underlying principles of the grammar" and "learn" to mean learning the details of the grammar? Of course, one also has to learn the gismu, which takes time. > Well... this whole place-structure business seemed a bit wierd to me at first. Especially as, when I learnt lojban, it was with an ancient series of lessons written by Athelstan, which, once the place-structure was explained, spent some effort explaining the SE cmavo along with how all the zo'e could be removed... Hmm. I didn't find the place structure too difficult; in principle, it's just fill in the places from left to right, plus a list of shortcuts and transformations. You can drop trailing {zo'e}. You can construct new selbri with arbitrarily permuted places using sequences of {se} {te} {xe} etc. And if you want to explicitly label which place a thing goes in, you can use {fa} {fe} {fi} etc. What I find difficult is grasping the grouping operators. I very often find myself wanting simple general-purpose parentheses. For example, to produce something like "the yogic flyer" you have to use {be}: {le volfli be le makfioga be'o}. At least, I think so; I can't find any such usage in the CLL but I can't find any other way to do this and people have claimed it's right. Nobody has really explained it like this so I'm not sure, but it seems like the usual way to attach things in lojban is thing1 (special purpose connective) thing2 (special purpose continuation) thing3 ... (special purpose terminator) where the terminator can sometimes be eliminated "where this does not involve ambiguity". (This last condition always implies significant computation or significant memory to verify). But then there is {cu}, which seems to supply terminators for all (most?) constructions at once. And some operators have the form (operator) text (special purpose terminator) (This is my impression of how one tells the scope of {nu}, for example.) In this case, the operator has some "natural extent" after which it stops applying (a bridi in this case, sometimes a selbri); if you want to end it early you can supply its terminator, but if you want to extend it you must use some sort of grouping operator with tighter binding. Some operators (such as {na'e}) support a variant on this: it can be used as {na'e ke} ... {ke'e} or just as {na'e}, which I think binds more tightly than {na'e ke}. I can't find any explanation at all for terminators or precedence for zo'u. I assume it applies to a single bridi, and to terminate it you terminate the bridi? Finally, there are various words that can be thrown in more-or-less at random; for example, you can introduce attitudinals at all sorts of places in the sentence, and it's not very clear to me how big a piece of the sentence they're supposed to apply to (perhaps the last word unless it's a terminator, in which case to the whole thing terminated?) I suspect I am not the only one who finds these grouping rules complicated; the CLL contains many sentences like: #Note the importance of using ``kei'' after ``su'u'' when the x2 of #``su'u'' (or any other abstractor) is being specified; otherwise, the #``be lo'' ends up inside the abstraction bridi. By contrast, the meanings of the various constructs are not much harder to learn than the meanings of gismu. I must say, it's deceptive to claim that the number of gismu (about 1300?) is the size of the vocabulary to learn. One must learn most of these, some additional lujvo, and also many hundred (thousand?) cmavo, along with any special syntax associated with them. For example the three different quoting operators all have different syntax, all different from the usual lojban grouping. {na} has special syntax (it goes before the selbri and affects the whole bridi) which is not entirely specified (how does it interact with tenses? it may or may not have a different meaning depending on whether it's before or after other just-before-the-bridi modifiers). And {bo}, in addition to binding more tightly, reverses the usual left-binding rule. My impression is that there are too many special-case grammatical objects, that is, that the syntax is too closely linked to the semantics for the language to be as simple to learn as it could be. I think most cmavo could be given gismu-like standardized grammar (in fact, exactly gismu-like in that they would have place structures and be used in the same way) apart from a short list of purelsy structural cmavo to indicate grouping. But probably such a simple language would be cumbersome to speak; in any case, since I do not speak lojban well, it's foolish for me to think about improving on it. Andrew