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Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:14:47 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Why left-grouping of tanru?
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On 9/4/2014 10:58 AM, TR NS wrote:
> Was wondering why "left-grouping rule" was chosen as the default for tanru?
>
> I ran though random examples of using two adjectives in my head and they
> are almost always right-grouping. "big red truck", "bright yellow star",
> "little lost ant", there are exceptions, like "dark roast coffee", but
> even then the right-grouping would be okay. But in the other examples
> left-grouping would be just flat wrong.

The short answer is that Lojban has that default because TLI Loglan had 
that default, and we weren't trying to change anything without a good 
reason.

Why that default for Loglan?  John Clifford may know for certain, since 
he predates nearly everyone living in his work on the language, but my 
wife believes that the reason is that mathematical grouping defaults to 
left grouping for the same operator, and also that left grouping is 
easiest to parse as you go along.  But JCB did attempt to analyze all 
possible groupings to ensure that all were well-representable in Loglan 
(his attempts were incomplete, since he had only 16 of the 24 possible 
groupings, but the complete set was eventually worked out. IIRC, John 
was actively involved in that solution.)

The problem was called the "pretty little girls school" (PLGS) problem 
because there are ways to read that phrase that invoke most or all of 
the possible groupings.

In the Lojban design era, we extended the analysis to longer strings 
(eventually "pretty little girls school house door knob") with much more 
convoluted possibilities, but I doubt that any documentation remains of 
that analysis.

lojbab

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