Do jbopre use terminators? (was: Is Lojban a CFG?)

["Chris Capel" <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On 7/12/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> I find the general idea interesting; I'm going to have to ponder it
> a bit.  I think, though, that most people would rather the parser
> reject a sentence like:
>
> le nu le gleki prenu klama cinri
>
> rather than turn it into the equivalent of:
>
> le nu le gleki ku prenu ku klama cinri
>
> when the user obviously intended:
>
> le nu le gleki prenu ku klama ku cinri
>
> This (the current behaviour) seems to me to reduce the chances for
> confusion *substantially*.  But then I haven't thought about it much
> yet.

That's an interesting example, because it really *is* obvious what the
speaker intended. I wonder: Let's say Lojban came to be used by a
sizable number of people for everyday communication. People would
probably sometimes mistakenly leave out terminators like that,
especially when the listener can easily fill them back in. Most times
they would be understood, and the error might even go unnoticed.
Because strictly unnecessary grammar tends to evolve out of a
language, this tendency would probably increase over time. So would
these required elidable terminators (is that the right term?)
eventually come to be used only in contexts where the listener would
have trouble semantically "fixing" the statement (probably still much
of the time), and left out when the meaning is obvious (perhaps only
occasionally)? If this happened, would speakers retain the ability to
include them all easily, if needed?

I think this is pretty much the way English works, except that when
there really is ambiguity you don't have any handy terminators to use,
lamentably, and have to resort to various forms of emphasis and phrase
markers, or even rewording. This can really get in the way when I
start wanting to write extremely long sentences (minus parenthetical
remarks, which don't pose a problem for parsing (except for
complexity) unless the sentence is spoken). Which is probably good for
my writing style, for the most part. (When I'm trying to write really
well I don't allow myself as many parentheses.)

If English *did* have Lojban-style phrase terminators, how often would
they be required? Less than Lojban, because English has more parts of
speech, and less nesting? Or is this just an illusion based on my
being a native speaker of English?

Incidentally, computer translation programs often don't need to figure
out phrase grouping if the target language has the same associational
ambiguity (and among western European languages it seems like they
usually do), because the ambiguity is resolved by the listener in the
same way in both languages.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)