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Re: [bpfk] BPFK work
Jorge Llambías wrote:
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"?
In terms of a language definition that does not account for fragments,
such would be ungrammatical. We defined the formal grammar to account
for many kinds of fragments (though probably not all conceivable ones)
thereby making the "imperfect" acceptable and therefore "perfect" in the
absolute dichotomy defined by a non-error-correcting parser.
Or are you saying that back then you considered it so, but now you
consider it perfect Lojban?
If it parses, then the parser considers it good Lojban. (I'm not sure
that my opinion mattered then, much less now).
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".
1. The formalization is about parsing. It says nothing about meaning.
Human language, however, is more about meaning than about grammatical
correctness. Thus human beings often speak ungrammatically but are
still understood. "Perfect" or "true" seem to be inappropriate
adjectives for language in that context.
2. The formal grammar is a good part of the basic definition of Lojban,
but CLL consists of a lot more than the Appendix containing the formal
grammar, and the bulk of the arguments regarding the completeness and
accuracy of CLL are not about the formal grammar. If the formal grammar
was itself the entirety of the basic definition of Lojban, it would not
matter to you or anyone else whether xorlo was adopted, since xorlo did
not change the formal grammar.
3. The formalization of the machine grammar has not to my knowledge ever
been fully implemented, and the fact that we are having this discussion
indicates that the concept of "text" was never formally defined in terms
necessary to account for multiple speakers. In the formal grammar,
"text" is everything up until a fa'o (which almost no one uses - except
apparently in Twitter), and thus it is arbitrary to say that change of
speaker ends a text. By the formal language, no fa'o: no end of text.
There is no mention of "end of speaker". Of course, in the formal
language there is no such thing as "ungrammatical text". It either
parses or it is nonsense and not "text".
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.
By the formal grammar, if there is no fa'o, there is no new text.
Indeed, by the formal grammar, there is no concept of more than one text
and after a fa'o, everything else until the end of time is non-Lojban. %^)
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?
The computer doesn't know what a "speaker" is. It knows what a
text-stream is, and that such a text-stream ends with a fa'o and only
with a fa'o. Actual implementation is thus erroneous in that it can end
other than with a fa'o (i.e with whatever the computer system recognizes
as "end-of-text".
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
"Formally", to the Lojbanic computer, that is "do klama ma lo zarci".
It doesn't know what "A:" and "B:" are. "Formally", to the Lojbanic
computer there is no possibility of more than one text.
I hope John Cowan says something, because if he agrees more with you
than with me on this one I will be extremely worried.
%^)
lojbab
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