From cbmvax!uunet!cuvma.bitnet!LOJBAN Tue Jan 28 11:08:25 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Tue, 28 Jan 92 11:08 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA24843; Tue, 28 Jan 92 10:19:43 EST Received: from rutgers.edu by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA05231; Tue, 28 Jan 92 09:55:36 -0500 Received: from cbmvax.UUCP by rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.4/3.08) with UUCP id AA06541; Tue, 28 Jan 92 09:08:33 EST Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA18559; Tue, 28 Jan 92 08:55:24 EST Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (via uunet.UU.NET) by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA18319; Tue, 28 Jan 92 08:36:45 -0500 Message-Id: <9201281336.AA18319@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU (IBM VM SMTP R1.2.1) with BSMTP id 6279; Tue, 28 Jan 92 08:35:19 EST Received: by CUVMB (Mailer R2.07) id 4481; Tue, 28 Jan 92 08:32:20 EST Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1992 05:05:06 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: summary of a busy weeken, part 1 of 2 X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: RO Here is the promised report on John Cowan's visit to DC the weekend of the 18th-20th. Attendees included Lojbab, John, Nora, Athelstan, and Sylvia Rutiser, with pc joining in by phone a couple of times. The original agenda included: - 2nd review of papers on the Lojban tense system and MEX (mathematical expressions) system, with the intent of having them ready, if possible, for publication with JL16. - Nora and John have been working on a formal statement of the Lojban morphology algorithm, and some issues needed resolution and decision. - Deciding on all open cmavo questions, to allow a baseline of that list. - Reviewing all open comments on the place structures and definitions of gismu - Review of the progress in switching JL over to a subscription basis and the current fundraising drive - Preliminary decisions on book publishing - Determining a policy on efforts by Dave Cortesi, Bob Chassell, and others to put together Lojban reference books. - Including John in a Lojban conversation session (he has never before been able to participate in one, since no one else in the NYC area seems to be actively studying). John arrived late Fri. nite, and we started the weekend right by talking till 4AM. Athelstan arrived about 2AM to join the party. Most of Saturday was spent socializing and discussing business matters, and various minor issues, and reviewing the tense paper. Saturday night, we again quit late, around 5AM this time, with everyone rising in time to be fully awake for the Lojban conversation session. That ended up starting late, but the 5 of us participated in fairly lively discussion for about 2 hours. John had no real trouble following what was said, and throwing his own comments in. We then talked in English for about an hour until Sylvia and Athelstan had to leave. After dinner, we started on place structures, and kept going until 5AM again. We resumed around 11AM, and kept cranking till 5AM Tues. morning. Athelstan was there for all of Monday's discussions, Nora lasted until 1030PM, since she had to work on Tuesday. There was a long conversation with pc in the afternoon to resolve issues that he needed a voice/vote in. Monday evening, we took a break from the x1's and x2's of place structures to work on the x's and y's of MEX. On Tuesday, John and I woke around 11AM, and kept talking till I dropped him at the bus station around 1PM. Whew! Everything accomplished. Now here is the summary of effects: grammar The grammar is of course baselined and frozen until we make updates and republish it in the Lojban books. Because we want the books to reflect the grammar after the books are done, we do our writing based on that next revision of the grammar. There are now 5 changes approved for that revision, all but one being extensions to the language. There is also one open issue to be resolved. When we write and publish materials in JL, they may be in accordance with the current baseline, or we may slip some next-baseline grammar items in. Because we want people to stick with the current baseline, we are not going to distribute or talk much about the next one until it is ready for adoption. I will summarize the changes in store so people know what is going on: - adding GEK sentence GI observative as a permitted form - adding capability for free modifiers in several new places - adding selma'o ZEI to support a morphology algorithm change (see below) - adding JEK+BO to parallel BO connective structures for other logical connectives - correction of a precedence error, so that Ek+KE and GIhEk+KE bind more tightly than other connective structures - the open issue is that, in the current grammar, it is impossible to use a PA+MAI free-modifier after a number even though it is grammatically legal, since the number will absorb the added PA values (terminator BOI is not usable to solve this problem since unlike in other situations, freemods in numbers occur before the terminator. The parser does not consider this an ambiguity because numbers are assembled using the higher precedence lexer rules. A workaround is to separate the PA+MAI from the number with a UI word or a Y hesitation. The preferred solution being investigated is to add an elidable terminator (other than BOI) to terminate subscripts, which should then allow freemods to be attached after the BOI, instead of before. (If this doesn't make much sense, just consider it an artifact of the grammar that we are polishing out and don't worry about it for now.) The cmavo "ja'u" is being reserved for this terminator, or for use in some other solution that arises. morphology John and Nora have resolved all open issues regarding the morphology algorithm, and Nora will be writing it up, probably to be reviewed on Lojban List before publication in the reference book. Problems included strings of vowels and lujvo involving le'avla. Since the morphology is baselined, technically any change is a baseline change, but all changes being considered are in areas not well-defined in the existing informal Synopsis that describes the morphology. Highlights (again, these are post-book baseline features.) - Adding selma'o ZEI, with only cmavo "zei", will eliminate various other schemes of making lujvo using le'avla, all of which involved either tricky stress/pronunciation problems or had potential breakdowns of a nature similar to the Tosmabru test used in regular lujvo. The result would have been rules so unintuitively complicated as to make them impractical to use on-the-fly, when most such compounds will be made. ZEI is processed in advance of lexer rules (as is BU for lerfu and ZO, LOhU, ZOI, SI, SA, and SU) as part of the metalinguistic grammar. It causes one word immediately before it and one word immediately after it to be considered joined into a single construct equivalent to a BRIVLA. With the exception of some of those metalinguistic cmavo just listed, any Lojban word can be so joined to any other, allowing lujvo to be based on cmavo that have no rafsi, as well as le'avla. Many-part le'avla lujvo will have a ZEI between each pair of terms. Regular gismu and lujvo may also be used as terms in a ZEI lujvo. - cmavo space is now recognized to include certain structures with 0 or 1 consonant, followed by more than two vowels, with apostrophe used between every pair (except when diphthongs occur). Thus "zo'o'o'o could be a legal cmavo (with an obvious meaning of a more intense humor???) These will not be considered for defined use, but are added to the experimental cmavo space. The grammar will treat all experimental and undefined cmavo as if they were members of UI. - In any string of vowels involving cmavo, an apostrophe or a pause (if 2 words), and not a glide, must be used to pronounce them. Actual usage has been that certain UI members have not been separated from each other and other vowels by pauses, and this was determined to be too difficult for the resolver to handle, so it remains forbidden. An example is ".ua.ui" which we have been pronouncing "wah,wee", but must be pronounced as "wah.wee". An example showing the problems that can result is ".ui.iu", which if pronounced without a pause is indistinguisable from ".ui,u" - Names will be permiited to have "la", "lai", and "doi" in them WHEN PRECEDED BY A CONSONANT. This means that the 'd' or 'l' must be the at-least-2nd in a consonant cluster such that the preceding letter and the d/l form a permissible cluster, or initial at the beginning of a word. This means that a name "zdoil." or "jdoil" is legal, and every consonant except another "l" is permitted before "la" and "lai". Thus while "*nort.kerolainas." remains illegal, it can easily be changed to "nort.kerlainas". This will then allow a certain erroneous comic strip to be corrected, by naming the cat "mlat.", "*lat" remaining illegal. It also corrects the embarassment that the other English name of the language - "loglan." - has been an illegal name in "lojban." - Names are formally restricted from having impermissible medial consonant clusters in them. The most significant effect of this is to require the name "*djeimz." to be changed, since "mz" is not a permissible medial. "djeimyz." is acceptable. cmavo The following cmavo changes are made. Note that two of the cmavo, zei and ja'u, have grammars contingent upon the next baseline. They will be in the next cmavo list anyway, even though the current grammar will not handle them. zei ZEI lujvo glue joins preceding and following word into a lujvo ne'o VUhU factorial reassigned from "zei" to make room for above bu'u FAhA coincident with space/time tense equivalent of CA be'a FAHA north of berti ne'u FAhA south of snanu du'a FAhA east of stuna vu'a FAhA west of parallel with du'a (these are added for compatibility with languages/cultures that use a fixed reference frame for directions instead of a speaker-based one. A secondary if trivial advantage is that a Lojban wind-vane is more interesting, instead of having the letters B-S-S-S for the four cardinal points.) voi NOI descriptive clause non-veridical restrictive clause used to form complicated le-like descriptions using "ke'a" This is in a way similar to goi/GOI, but used with clauses (bridi) on the right. It defines a sumti on the left as being the thing the speaker has in mind which fills "ke'a" in the clause. Nick asked for this in connection with an alternate approach to sumti raising that he prefers to "tu'a". Example: ko'a voi lenu ke'a cisma cu pluka mi cu zutse The it1 whose smiling pleases me sits. to'a BY lower case shift reassigned from current "voi" tordu ma'e BAI of material used to add a material to a bridi more specific than the existing seta'i marji de'a ZAhO pausitive event contour for a temporary halt and ensuing pause in a process denpa di'a ZAhO resumptive event contour for resumption of a paused process mi de'a citka ca lenu la noras. tavla I pausitively eat while Nora talks. vu'i LUhI the sequence converts other sumti types to sequences, even if order is unspecified ja'u JAhU reserved reserved for possible solution to PA+MAI problem mentioned above remaining unassigned (22): bi'a bi'e bi'u bu'o bo'a bo'e bo'i bo'o bo'u ce'e ce'u ci'a do'i ju'e mi'i na'a ne'e re'u te'i va'e va'u vu'o gismu are discussed in the second part of this message John Cowan will hopefull discuss sets and masses and sequences in more detail in a separate post, and will of course correct my errors in these messages since he ahs a better memory than I do. ---- lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 lojbab@grebyn.com