Whoa! Is this really a proposal to have *one* cmavo= for all tanru? A sort of weak 'zei'? I was expecting the old "= the relation between the modifier and the modified is ambiguous" screed.&nb= sp; Is there any real reason to do this? They already have the shorte= st cmavo of all, ' ', joining them. To be sure, it is used for other = things as well, but each use is contextually defined and that has to be at = least one such joining (maybe just concatenation, but that makes for hard r= eading) for a language to work at all -- we can't mark everything (be= cause of infinite regress). So, any other tanru marker is going to ma= ke Lojban sentences (which already suffer from a lot of cmavo snow) longer,= often a lot longer. And to what gain? Are there tanru that aren't recognizable as such? I suppose that there can be for us poor= non-computers, as we go down some tree of subordinate arguments or whateve= r. But surely these are very rare and and best be handled a "WTF" -- = for which there is a handy cmavo -- rather than marking all the non-problem= atic ones.

As long as we are not going to go to some versi= on of full parentheses, nothing is better than what we have (which almost t= ranslates into full parentheses when used correctlly).

From: Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>

To:= lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, December 26, 2010 1:24:46 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Tanru automatically forming
At the quoted response in particular: what? The simplest bridi would have n= o tanru; all the sumti would be LE GISMU, and the selbri would also be GISM= U. Under this system a typical sentence would look like {lo broda brode lo = brodi lo brodo}.

More generally:
From the logical perspective, this argument makes a = degree of sense; saying "sumti ends here" or "predicate starts here" does m= ake more sense than saying "tanru begins here".

However, from a cmavo count perspective, this isn't really the case; yo= u could write an entire paragraph without ever forming a tanru, quite easil= y, and in the meantime the majority of the sentences would have a {cu}. The= main disadvantage (and I thought about this after I sent my original email= , actually) is that some select sentences wind up having a LOT of cmavo, an= d in fact a lot of repeated cmavo.

For default grouping in particular, there's a pretty easy fix for this = that I didn't think about: have the {ja'ei} go out in front. Then you only = need one {ja'ei} to group a bunch of selbri into a tanru with the default g= rouping. I think this would probably be necessary even when using {ke} and = friends (so you'd see {ja'ei broda ke brode brodi} and so on) but maybe not= .

The problem with {ja'ei} out in front is with situations that are curre= ntly treated by saying {lo broda brode cu brodi}. Then you really would be = adding cmavo, because you'd have to say {lo ja'ei broda brode cu brodi}. Bu= t only in that case would you be adding cmavo; I'm fairly sure that the net= number of cmavo would still be lower.

mu'o mi'e .latros.

On Sun, Dec 26, 20= 10 at 12:57 PM, Oleksii Melnyk <lamelnyk@gmail.com> wrote:

2010/12/26 Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>

{lo gerku cu klama} is more common than {lo gerku klama cu bajra}.

Even simplest bridi have only one place for "cu", = but 2..6 for a tanru. So, exchanging [0..1] cu with [2..6] "ja'ei"(or= whatever) is a waste of brevity.

--
mu'o mi'e lex

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