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[lojban-beginners] Re: (no subject)



On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 03:02:19PM -0500, xod wrote:
> melissa@fastanimals.com wrote:
> >On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >>On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 02:35:50PM -0600, melissa@fastanimals.com wrote:
> >>>These syntactically senseless sentences are possible in English and
> >>>Spanish, and I seem to recall that they're possible in Swahili as
> >>>well (although my Swahili is quite rusty).  I suspect that they are
> >>>possible in any natural language.
> >>>
> >>I think you're confused about the word 'possible'.
> >>   
> >
> >No, I'm not confused about the meaning of a simple and common word in
> >my native language.  I'm neither an idiot nor an ignoramus.  
> 
> If a sentence is "syntactically senseless", in what sense is it
> "possible" in any language? It's "possible" to string any bunch of
> characters together, as has already been said, but "possible" in the
> context of a language generally means "syntactically valid". 

I'm sorry, I *really* wasn't trying to be a jerk.  The word 'possible'
for me has a very, very specific meaning, and "syntactically valid" is a
drastic subset of that meaning.

It is *possible* to say anything you want.  That, to me, hasn't a
single, tiny thing to do with its syntactic validity.

-Robin

-- 
Me: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/  ***   I'm a *male* Robin.
"Constant neocortex override is the only thing that stops us all
from running out and eating all the cookies."  -- Eliezer Yudkowsky
http://www.lojban.org/             ***              .i cimo'o prali .ui