[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [bpfk] BPFK work
On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 9:01 PM, Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> Back then, the concept was that if the parse fails, the text was bad Lojban,
> period. Stop there. There was no error analysis.
That's still the concept today.
> If I fed the entire
> conversation to the parser as a text, and it did not have the ".i" with each
> new speaker, it failed, and therefore was ungrammatical.
The difference is that today (or always?) we don't feed an entire
conversation to the parser. We only feed an entire text, i.e. usually
the production of one speaker.
> At the same time we recognized that the parser was imperfect and the YACC
> grammar did not address all of the metalinguistic rules.
>
> We thought we had a superior grammar merely by allowing a much larger set of
> grammatical pieces of less than bridi length to be valid Lojban, recognizing
> that human beings would likely tend to speak less than perfect Lojban and
> less than complete sentences.
So you consider what the formal grammar calls "fragment" to be "less
than perfect Lojban"?
Or are you saying that back then you considered it so, but now you
consider it perfect Lojban?
I'm trully amazed that we have such a different understanding about
this, I wouldn't have thought this kind of thing was among the things
we usually disagree about.
I thought it was a given that the formal grammar was the basic
definition of Lojban, and that the rest was fluff. You seem to be
saying that your intuitive understanding is the important part, and
that the formalization is only some approximation which may or may not
fully capture the "true Lojban".
>> Do you no longer agree with what you taught in your lessons?
>
> The lessons didn't really address the issue. CLL didn't really address the
> issue.
I don't remember if it does explicitly, but it clearly has plenty of
examples where conversations are not single parsable texts.
> The "machine language" and the "human language" are not necessarily the
> same. The question of "what is a text?" was always considered to be a
> "machine language" question and hence not something we "taught".
We are discussing the formal definition, aren't we? I know you didn't
teach what the construct "text" was, but the way you presented
conversations clearly showed each speaker producing their own separate
"text" construct, not contributing to a single conversational "text"
construct.
> You can legitimately say that our examples did not generally include a
> leading ".i", and hence taught-by-example that a leading ".i" was not
> important.
Right, but I'm not even concerned with "important". I'm concerned that
you think it is somewhat less than correct Lojban for the second
speaker to produce a new text.
> If I were conversing with a computer, I would expect that the computer would
> need the separators.
Why? Why wouldn't the computer just parse each speaker's text on its
own? It seems it would generally make life easier for it, if it had
one.
> I never really considered one person finishing another person's sentence to
> be "part of the language", but can accept that people might want a way to do
> so.
This seems like a secondary issue to me now. I'm too amazed by our
completely different takes on how to formally interpret something as
basic as:
A: do klama ma
B: lo zarci
I hope John Cowan says something, because if he agrees more with you
than with me on this one I will be extremely worried.
mu'o mi'e xorxes
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BPFK" group.
To post to this group, send email to bpfk-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to bpfk-list+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/bpfk-list?hl=en.