From jordimastrullenque@yahoo.com Wed Oct 20 03:22:24 2004 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 20 Oct 2004 03:22:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from web51610.mail.yahoo.com ([206.190.38.215]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.34) id 1CKDbh-0003G6-9y for lojban-list@lojban.org; Wed, 20 Oct 2004 03:22:13 -0700 Message-ID: <20041020102139.42822.qmail@web51610.mail.yahoo.com> Received: from [62.57.113.42] by web51610.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 20 Oct 2004 03:21:39 PDT Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 03:21:39 -0700 (PDT) From: jordi mas Subject: [lojban] elidable terminators [was Feedback (long, sorry)] To: lojban-list@lojban.org In-Reply-To: <200410191805.26873.phma@phma.hn.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-archive-position: 8803 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: jordimastrullenque@yahoo.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > > There is no one feature in Lojban, as far as we > know, that is not found > > in some natural language. > > Including terminators? > > A spoken word indicating a quotation occurs in > Sanskrit; but the beginning of > the quotation is not marked. Attitudinals occur in > some language near the > India-Burma border, Lahu I think. Other examples? You are missing the point, even if some languages do use markers at both ends of some sentence-pieces. What is unnatural about lojban terminators is the "can be elided unless ambiguity results" rule. I doubt any natural language does something of the sort. AFAIK "truly optional" elision seems to be rare in natural languagews. When an English grammar says that the word "that" in the sentence "I know he went" is elided 'optionally', that usually means in practice that some speakers do it always and others never. Or that in some conditions it must and in others it cannot. But I doubt that any natural spoken language does use "ambiguity resulting" as a condition. (Some written languages do that sometimes.) As I see it, the designers of lojban used this unnatural feature in order to achieve contradictory goals: unambiguous syntax, more or less free word order, and some sentences being as short as their English counterparts. If they had put up with the sentence {mi tavla do} to be more verbose than its English counterpart "I tell you", or allowed it to have a different word order, then a way could have been found to make the syntax unambiguous without using elidable terminators. Unfortunately, "ease of learning" was not given much priority in the list of goals. --jordi ===== __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com