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

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 12:03 PM 4/6/04 -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
>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.

Originally the rule was time-tense then space-tense with rigid markers, and 
sometimes nulls if you wanted to leave something unspecified.  The current 
state was brought about as part of the loosening of strictures.

I'm afraid of loosening the rules too much if not necessary, for fear we 
will end up with something like the PA string situation and the UI string 
situation where everything is grammatical but interpretation is potentially 
a nightmare.  UI of course is extra-grammatical.  PA-strings originally did 
have a substructure, by Cowan convinced me that it was too constraining - 
there simply were too many things someone might want to do in a PA string 
to cover all possibilities.  Yet now we have questions about 
interpretations of oddball combinations like (I think it was) 
fi'ufi'u.  I'd be afraid that any informalization of the tense grammar 
would lead to a lot more uninterpretable combinations.  The X-ku Y-ku 
breakup at least gives an interpretation for odd strings, even if it may 
not be the one people would like.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org




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