From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:44:37 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 1 Jun 1993 13:25:19 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2215; Tue, 01 Jun 93 13:24:20 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3254; Tue, 01 Jun 93 13:12:08 EDT Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1993 18:09:44 +0100 Reply-To: Colin Fine Sender: Lojban list From: Colin Fine Subject: Re: JimC on Colin on JimC on Frank's easy text To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Tue Jun 1 19:09:44 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: Jim replies to my response to his comments on Frank: > > I interpreted it as "le mlatu poi cmalu". What's the problem? > >The problem is, you're too human. Imagine Nick's Prolog project; how can >it decide what interpretation to use? To us, it's obvious that this tanru >is supposed to be restrictive. This problem will always be with us at some level, if the language is going to be able to refer to those messy, imprecise things and concepts which make up our world. Your dikyjvo moves the uncertainty out a distance, but it's still there. I have no objection to your following it - and indeed I might quite often myself - but I do not want it legislated on. > I'm not going to get into a flame war >(particularly with people who LIKE the German style), because it's a >matter of taste, but I wanted to explain that my comment was based on >a universal principle, rather than on a non-existent Lojban style guide. After I read this a couple of times, I realised what you were meaning by 'universal' - viz that you hold to a general principle underlying your taste. And of course it is a well-known principle: I think Chomsky described a transformation called 'Heavy Clause Shift' or something like that. I have no objection to your holding such a view, and as I said my own taste agrees. I do object to your stating it as a matter of fact. You perhaps assumed that making it a matter of style implied that this was a personal view; but this might not be obvious to people who are not experienced in Lojban, and who see it among a list of corrections to grammar and vocabulary. Re observatives: I wrote an essay about VSO a few months ago, pointing out that Lojban could be changed to VSO with no syntactic change, and by altering (not adding or removing) one rule of interpretation. [viz: At present: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1 unless it follows the selbri, when it is numbered 2. This applies in all contexts. New rule: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1 except inside selgadri, where it is numbered 2.] The semantics of observatives are not very clear, and as I said before many writers are frequently omitting x1 to generate what are technically (syntactically) observatives, and semantically sentences with elided x1's. Particularly common are: 1) elided x1's in narrative: le ctuca cu cadzu .i viska le tixru .i terpa tu'ari 2) elided x2's together with conversion or explicit marking to get a heavy clause afterwards: cumki falenu mi clira seixruti (or) se cumki lenu mi clira seixruti