Re: Another question about imperatives

[John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>]

> la kris cusku di'e
>
> > I wasn't sure about that -- I thought .e connected two sumti within the
> > context of a particular place, rather than conjoining the places themselves.
> >  I.e. you could say "ne'i le botpi .e le tanxe" for "in the bottle and also
> > in the box" but not "ne'i le botpi .e ne'i le tanxe".  Or can you do both?

la xorxes. cusku di'e

> The first is definitely right. I think you can't do the second (although
> the parser accepts it, but comes up with some strange stuff) so my translation
> was wrong. {ne'i le botpi e ne'ibo le tanxe} is right too, but I have
> no idea what it means.

It means "within the bottle and the cup (where the bottle is inside the cup)"
and so refers to a nested state of affairs.  :-)

The parser accepts "ne'i le botpi .e ne'i le tanxe" because of a long-standing
and apparently ineradicable misfeature.  Because we are using yacc, which is
designed for programming languages, we get into trouble.  Inserting
elided terminators is done using yacc's error recovery, which sometimes has
a habit of skipping three tokens in an attempt to avoid too many closely
nested errors.  This is fine for error recovery, but bad for a language
feature.  To take an unambiguous example:

        bai le botpi .e bau le tanxe cu co'e

parses as:

        ({<bai KU> <bau [le tanxe KU]>} cu {co'e VAU})

because the error at ".e bau" is referred back three tokens earlier to
the recovery step of inserting "KU" after "bai", and then the three
tokens get tossed.

I really must put in a check to see to it that the parser outputs every
word it inputs.

--
John Cowan                                              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.