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Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 21:33:08 +0100
From: Wuzzy <almikes@aol.com>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Quoting with ZOI can be ambigious
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On Fri, 10 Jan 2014 14:08:20 -0500
Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:

>  I agree that the problem is real, but I don't agree that it's
> "serious trouble" After all, in 30 years, it hasn't been an issue.
The whole point of zoi is to quote everything exactly. Not being able
to quote leading spaces or periods is annoying.
And just because it wasn=92t =93an issue=94 for 30 years does not mean we
should ignore it now.

Besides, Lojban is a language which prides itself as having an
unambigious grammar. I showed that there is a part which causes
ambigiouty. ZOI obviously is part of the grammar, so this IS serious
trouble, because one of Lojban=92s major premises is broken here!

> Nonetheless, your solution looks fine from the point of view of
> disambiguation,=20
Thanks.

> but I doubt seriously that anyone will care to use
> it, because of the onerousness of having to use it for the 99.999% of
> case where it doesn't actually matter
I think my proposal is actually pretty simple. I basically just
proposed to make two periods mandatory. I can=92t see what is
onrous about two periods: It doesn=92t affect speaking, since you=92d have
to pause anyways. It affects writing just a very little, because two
points are written quickly. It affecty typing by requiring you to type
lousy two more characters. It is overstated to say that THIS is onerous.
Actually you pay a very small fee. But what you get for the change is a
way to quote strings unambigiously.
But also keep in mind that I not only aim to make people adopt it, but,
more importantly, make this change _official_. I want this or a similar
change to be included in the 2nd edition of the Reference Grammar.

Also I disagree that it for 99.999% of the time it does not matter.
Consider programming for example. If you want to quote a snippet of
code, it is often crucial to quote it exactly, character-for-character.
Points and spaces often DO matter. And in a programming-related text,
the percentage of =93where it does not matter=94 is likely to be much lower
than 99.999%. Or if you just want to quote the name of a file in a
GNU/Linux environment, you are going to quote a lot of =93dot files=94,
that is, files which start with a dot, like =93.bashrc=94, =93.vimrc=94, et=
c.

> If a person would really be that concerned about a
> leading space, for example, they might resort to a circumlocution
> like lu'e sepli bu joi zoi zoi Peter Smith zoi lu'u (not 100% sure
> this is correct), which would also keep much of the speech/text
> isomorphism not usually found in zoi constructions anyhow.
I think =93joi=94 is not the correct cmavo here but I guess I get your
point. Anyways, which cmavo is the correct one is not important for now.
What you proposed is just a quick and ugly hack. Yes, it would probably
work, but I=92d consider it inconvenient.
With this hack you are basically just dancing around the problem, just
because you think my proposal is =93onerous=94 to use.

And what is in zoi quotes does not need to keep audio-visual
isomorphism. That=92s the point! For example, you can=92t really =93hear=94
spaces and periods and commas in English but that=92s not Lojban=92s
problem. Lojban does not have to fix the =93flaws=94 of other languages, it
would be enough if Lojban is able to quote texts written in them
unambigiously.
That=92s what makes ZOI so great: Instead of trying to shoehorn foreign
languages into Lojban=92s ruleset, ZOI simply accepts that other
languages are not like Lojban, don=92t neccessarily have isomorphism, yet
it is able to unambigously quote them without changing them =85 well,
expect when you=92re dealing with trailing spaces and periouds =85 :-/ This
exception is which bugs me and actually it is just plain ugly and does
bring no benefit.

I hope you understand.

Greetings!
--=20
Wuzzy
XMPP: Wuzzy2@jabber.ccc.de
E-Mail: wuzzy2@mail.ru

--=20
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