Re: [lojban] Re: Some ideas/questions (long)

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 10:49 AM 5/7/03 +0800, tk1@despammed.com wrote:
> [Robert LeChevalier:]
>
> > over to TLI.  Prothero in particular invented the use of the "error" token
> > to define elidable terminators which is a key feature that TLI Loglan and
> > Lojban both share.  Prothero expressly gave us permission in case it proved
>
> Apologies for hijacking this thread, but upon hearing about this use of the
> "error" token, I am starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable. Specifically, I
> fear that using such strange hacks will make it harder to explain (and
> grasp) intuitively when certain words can be elided, without referring to a
> specific 1970's parsing technology.

The specific parsing technology in this case is indeed fundamental to the 
design of the language.

> (I am thinking of utterances such as ".i le gerku jersi le mlatu fa'o"
> without "cu" before "jersi" -- this can be `intuitively' construed as a
> garden-path utterance for "The dog chases the cat", but will be rejected by
> an LALR(1) parser.)

It is not rejected by the Lojban parser, but doesn't have that meaning.  It 
merely represents the grammatical list of two sumti: "The dog-chaser, the 
cat", which might be an answer to the question:

ma .e ma cu xebni le gerku

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org