From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Tue Nov 05 19:07:57 2002 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Tue, 05 Nov 2002 19:07:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from mrin01.spray.se ([212.78.193.7] helo=mrin01.st1.spray.net) by digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.05) id 189GWr-0001fb-00 for lojban-list@lojban.org; Tue, 05 Nov 2002 19:06:58 -0800 Received: from lmin02.st1.spray.net (unknown [212.78.202.102]) by mrin01.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 62A571D38F9 for ; Wed, 6 Nov 2002 03:34:33 +0100 (CET) Received: from oemcomputer (host213-121-71-127.surfport24.v21.co.uk [213.121.71.127]) by lmin02.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id DDF0C1867B for ; Wed, 6 Nov 2002 03:34:31 +0100 (MET) From: "And Rosta" To: Subject: [lojban] Re: What the heck is this crap? Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 02:36:21 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <20021105191401.X73242-100000@granite.thestonecutters.net> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 X-archive-position: 2440 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list xod: > On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > > Of course, if the zo'e is left implicit, you don't know whereabouts it > > should be inserted relative to other sumti, so the problem arises only > > for explicit zo'e > > Ah, great! (Sarcasm.) So your solution is to add another rule: that > implicit zo'e != explicit zo'e Is that adding another rule? It's plain fact that explicit zo'e has a position and that implicit zo'e doesn't. We also know that position can affect interpretation. If explicit zo'e had to behave as if its position didn't matter, this would be an exception, and would require a rule to state it. > > I don't see why you're reacting with such horror. People are always > > discovering issues like this that nobody has thought of before. It's > > inevitable that this happens > > You don't understand because you've never tried to converse in Lojban > Whenever you compose bridi, you have minutes in which to do so; not > seconds But I wouldn't expect you or (hypothetically) me or anyone, when *speaking* Lojban, to get the scope right, or even, for that matter, to get uncontroversial things like terminators right. For one thing, getting stuff right generally requires forethought, and spontaneous speech is not at all a forethoughty medium. For another thing, speaking imposes enormous processing demands on us, and we can't expect ourselves or others to get it right, though we can hope with practice to get better at it. If you study transcriptions of spontaneous spoken natural language, you'll see that it is incredibly disfluent, broken, ungrammatical -- that's in the very nature of spontaneous speech. I don't think it's reasonable to complain that Lojban has ways of being precise and unambiguous. But it might be reasonable to complain that it doesn't have ways of explicitly fudging logical structure when you the speaker know that your mind is too overloaded to be sure of getting it right. We could dream up some experimental cmavo to mark such fudging, if we think it is desirable to do so. --And.