Re: [lojban] Robin Confused (was Re: Re: "pu" versus "pu ku" and LR(1))

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Robin Lee Powell scripsit:

> I'm sorry, I must be missing something.  In the last two cases, unless
> I'm seriously confused, that's just a tense binding to a selbri.

Let me try to straighten this out.

You asked if it was okay to extend a tense before a gek-sentence to
allow not only tense+KU but also bare tense, on the assumption that the
distinction between bare tense and tense+KU is purely syntactic (tense+KU
can wander about the bridi, bare tense is only permitted in a few places).

I was concerned to point out that I thought it probably *was* syntactic,
but I wasn't 100% sure because of the question of ordering -- is it
strictly leftmost-outermost to rightmost-innermost, or do bare tenses
have different rules from tense+KU in the way that bare NA is different
from NA+KU?  I think it's the former, and so does xorxes, and so does
the Red Book -- so what it boils down to is, go ahead and allow tense
with or without KU.

The only point of my examples was to give a concrete case where ordering
of tense instances can change the meaning.

This, however, leads to a more fundamental point that xorxes has pointed
out before.  In Loglan, tense cmavo can appear in any order with no
grammatical rules.  Lojban has an intricate tense grammar with strong
restrictions, but in most contexts if you break the restriction the parser
will just supply appropriate ku's and it becomes grammatical anyhow.
So nobody will be able to learn those rules except in restricted contexts
like I+tense+BO, where no KU is allowed.  That makes me wonder if the
byfy shouldn't just jettison the rules, or transform them into something
other than syntactic rules -- conventions of interpretation instead.

-- 
John Cowan      jcowan@reutershealth.com        http://www.reutershealth.com
        "Not to know The Smiths is not to know K.X.U."  --K.X.U.