From jay.kominek@colorado.edu Tue Aug 14 10:09:53 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 14 Aug 2001 17:09:53 -0000 Received: (qmail 99820 invoked from network); 14 Aug 2001 17:08:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 14 Aug 2001 17:08:52 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ucsub.colorado.edu) (128.138.129.12) by mta1 with SMTP; 14 Aug 2001 17:08:52 -0000 Received: from ucsub.colorado.edu (kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu [128.138.129.12]) by ucsub.colorado.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2/ITS-5.0/student) with ESMTP id f7EH8pW10114 for ; Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:08:51 -0600 (MDT) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 11:08:51 -0600 (MDT) To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE From: Jay Kominek X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9610 On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, And Rosta wrote: > Off the top of my head, here's an inexhaustive list of what I think > unnatural: > > * the syntactic structure assigned by the yacc grammar > * terminators Many natural languages can be approximated by unambiguous context-free grammars. Even more languages can be handled by ambiguous ones. So a LALR(1) grammar doesn't seem strange, just unlikely to occur naturally. > * MEX I wouldn't be surprised if something similar evolved in languages if talking about math were a significantly more important part of the lives of all speakers. > * the complexity of Tense, and aspects of its semantics It seems a lot easier than conjugating Latin was in high school! :) > * semantically arbitrary place structures They don't seem to be arbitrary to me (at least not the order). Seems as though they're all the most frequently used things which might be related to each other. > * SE Sort of unfair to list it as its own thing, as its merely a side effect of the place structure. > * SI/SA/SU Hey. Natural languages have ways to indicate that you just made a mistake. They're not as explicit in the amount of mistake you made, but they're there. > * go'e go'o nei no'a That seems like a somewhat arbitrary list of anaphora to claim unnatural. What about go'i or ri? > * LAU s/LAU/lerfu/ And again, lerfu just make explicit something already in existance. > I don't think Lojban will test whether a putatative universal is > genuine, because these universals pertain to natural language, and > Lojban won't be a natural language until it is acquired as a > native tongue. Geesh, you say that like it won't ever happen. - Jay Kominek Plus =C3=A7a change, plus c'est la m=C3=AAme chose