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

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 12:54:26AM -0500, John Cowan wrote:
> 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.

Mmmmmm, boiling.  Thanks.

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

Gotcha.

> 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.

Or transform them into grammatical rules.

I agree; they should be made either more or less formal.  My stance on
half-way pseudo-formality should be obvious at this point.

-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