Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
> Lojban has formalized even hesitation, for god's sake,
> so why couldn't it formalize conversations?

In different languages, different hesitation words/sounds are used, so
it would be strange if Lojban didn't have at least one of those.

If you want a rule for formal conversations, here is one: In a formal
conversation, every participant must begin their utterances with "ni'o
mi'e <their name>".

With that rule, the parser can easily follow who says what, if not
always to whom. All the valid texts can be concatenated into one big
valid text and we don't need any new cmavo.

But that's a rule for a particular "formal conversation" game that
Lojbanists could play. It is not a formal grammar rule for generating
valid Lojban.

> If we didn't have {i}, this would be a description of Lojban:
>
>   Each person says one "sentence".  Each "sentence" is
>   fed to the parser, which doesn't care about whether any
>   other "sentences" are being said, in what order, etc.
>   Pragmatics dictate that the sentences form a "conversation",
>   and the "conversation" may even be divided into "texts", which
>   are sequences of sentences from one speaker that together
>   communicate a coherent "message".

No, that would be a description of a conversation in Lojban. That's
wouldn't be a description of Lojban.

Neither is my description of a conversation in Lojban as "an exchange
of texts" a description of Lojban.

Think of it this way, what is the formal grammar simulating, a speaker
or a community of speakers? Is it an algorithm for generating speech,
analogous to what a person can be said to have, or is it an algorithm
for generating conversations, analogous to what?

I guess it's a philosophical question. Do we think of language as the
thing that a speaker produces, or do we think of it as something
produced by a group?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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