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Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 11:46:03 +0200
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Subject: Re: [lojban] The White Knight (Through the Looking Glass)
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la .xorxes. cu cusku
> Nice work. I have a couple of comments:
>
> The ungrammatical incomplete sentence in lu-li'u quotes makes me much
> more uncomfortable than if it was an incomplete sentence standing on its
> own. It's understandable when a sentence is ungrammatical because the
> speaker didn't finish it, because they were interrupted, got sidetracked
> or whatever, but it's different when the missing words are not at the
> end of the sentence, i.e. in this case when "li'u" appears in an
> ungrammatical position. I don't know what the general answer should be
> for how to quote interrupted sentences (you obviously felt as I do that
> lo'u-le'u as a cop-out is unsatisfying), but in this case you could just
> avoid the issue by using "i jo nai" instead of "go nai ... gi ..."..

Right. I think I first had {... go nai klaku gi co'e li'u}, but while 
that maintains grammaticality it doesn't really correspond to being 
interrupted mid-speech (or just stopping etc). Just like you I don't 
know what the best general solution would be; I feel like there should 
be a way to have an ungrammatical chunk inside grammatical text without 
making the entire text parsefail. I don't know how one would parse human 
speech otherwise, which is going to be full of incomplete sentences. One 
thing that could help is to add a lot more productions to the fragment 
rule of the grammar. Another solution I pondered involved giving EOF 
some magic powers so that it can make incomplete sentences parse up to 
the failure part and just treat the remainder as some sort of 
meaningless left-over. What's important is that the grammatical part of 
such a sentence still gets parsed properly.

I'm not sure about the equally likely case where the mistake happens in 
the middle of a sentence. Perhaps an external statistical analyser would 
have to guess what was meant and make corrections accordingly...

lo'u-le'u doesn't satisfy me, because 1) it requires you to know in 
advance that a sentence or text will be ungrammatical (and it's an ugly 
give-away in a written story), and 2) because text in error quotes does 
not get parsed, so there is no way to extract meaning from what is said.

> The second comment is about "ba'e" in:
>
> -.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
> - na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra ba'e cmene lo cmene
>
> Assuming the emphasis marks the rheme/comment as opposed to the
> theme/topic, I would expect the "ba'e" on the second cmene. The first
> cmene just repeats Alice's sentence, so it's not what the White Knight
> is correcting. I understand the sentence structure is somewhat different
> in Lojban than in the original, but the "ba'e" there just sounds off to me.

I know exactly what you mean. When I read the Lojban I had the same 
feeling, so I went over to the English and found that it was "backwards" 
as well. {ba'e} on the second {cmene} definitely feels better, I just 
wasn't sure if I should make a "correction" to the original or if it fit 
the general weirdness in Alice.

mi'e la selpa'i mu'o

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