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Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

Jorge Llambías wrote:

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:


JL7 (1988) has a conversation in which each exchange has an explicitly
marked as optionally omitted ".i" at the beginning.  Look in the section  "A
Very Short Introduction to Lojban Grammar".  It was understood that the
continuation ".i" was there even if not explicit (there are other sample
conversations in the same newsletter that do not have the explicit ".i", so
I suspect that we just stopped teaching it because everyone (until now)
understood that exchanges were continuations.



That "everyone" does not include me. How do you explain this exchange then:

A:  ie pei melbi donri
B:  nai

B's reply is certainly not a continuation, because "ie pei melbi donri
nai" is not grammatical, and there is no omitted ".i" because ".i nai"
is also ungrammatical. The only way that can work in the official
grammar is if B is responding with a new text.


Obviously then I would have to "explain" the text as "ungrammatical".  %^)
It doesn't parse as it is, and the machine grammar doesn't recognize the possibility of multiple texts of that sort.
As B, I would feel obliged to use ".ienai go'i" if I wanted it to be "correct" Lojban, though I guess just "ienai" would work just as well in this instance. (If CLL has the above as an example, of course, I just say "we didn't think about that when John wrote it") 

lojbab


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