On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 5:50 AM, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/10/8 Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
Starting an utterance with ".i" is no guarantee that your utterance
won't be garbled if it's taken as continuation of what someone else is
saying. As a trivial example, if the other speaker ended with "zo", it
would just quote your ".i". But there are plenty of other cases that
could absorb your ".i" too.
That's how I think of it as working. I don't see how that's a
problem. That could even make sense:
A: .i .u'u mi djisku zo
(confused pause)
B: .i
A wasn't sure what word they meant to say that they meant to say, so B
helpfully inserted that it was ".i".
Of course that's one possible reading. It is you, the listener, who
decides which chunk of sound input you are going to treat as the text
to be parsed. You obviously can't take the whole history of sound
produced in the universe and treat that as a single piece of Lojban
text. And even if you restrict yourself to one room where you can hear
two simultaneous conversations, are you going to treat them both as a
single text mixing words from each conversation as they come to you?
No, you treat one chunk as one text and the other chunk as another
text. It's the same with two speakers participating in one
conversation. Sometimes they may complete each other's sentences, but
for the most part each produces their own text (which of course has
the other person's text as part of its context).
The problem is not that sometimes someone can complete someone else's
sentence. That's perfectly fine. The problem is if you take the
absolutist position that everything you say is necessarily a
continuation of what someone else has said before as part of the same
text. That just won't work.
It's my opinion and preference that a switch to a new speaker should
never automatically imply the beginning of a new text.
I agree. There's nothing automatic about it. It is often the case, but
you can't count on it being always the case.
I would like
to think of all of the speakers in a conversation as collaborating on
a single text, with only rare exceptions (such as perhaps "ta'a").
"ta'a" is a free modifier, so it can be inserted pretty much anywhere
without breaking anything.
I'm not even exactly sure what this idea of switching to a "new
speaker" means, in a Lojbanic context. Two different people don't
have to be two separate speakers in Lojban, do they? They can be
speaking jointly, as one referent of "mi". Surely we must allow two
people to collaboratively speak a single text. We shouldn't attempt
to grammatically enforce concepts of personal identity.
And I don't think anyone is suggesting that we do. What we shouldn't
do either is pretend that most conversations are not between two (or
more) different people. "mi" and "do" in most common cases have well
defined and distinct referents.
A: .i mi gleki
B: .i go'i ra'o
Obviously that's two texts, not one text ".i mi gleki .i go'i ra'o"
with the second part being a redundant repetition of the first.