[lojban] Re: Official parser and "lo ni'a zu crino"

[Jorge "Llambías" <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar>]

--- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 02:04:38PM -0700, Jorge Llamb?as wrote: 
> > --- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > The point that you seem to be missing is that "lo broda joi lo
> > > brode" requires infinite lookahead only to insert the elidable
> > > terminators, i.e. to read it as "lo broda ku joi lo brode ku". 
> > 
> > That's what I thought. 
> 
> Actually, in that case it only requires 2 token lookahead.  I haven't
> thought about the general case very much.

A number could follow joi, which can be as long as you like:

     le broda joi papapa...pa moi
vs.
     le broda joi papapa...pa brode

So you do need infinite lookahead.

> > But then what does John mean when he says:
> > 
> > > > > > > For one thing, human beings don't support infinite
> > > > > > > lookahead.  But I am okay with accepting things like "le
> > > > > > > broda joi le brodi", since that is not truly an ambiguity
> > 
> > How can he reject {le broda je le brode} on the grounds that humans
> > don't support infinite lookahead while in the same paragraph accept
> > {le broda joi le brode}? Isn't that self-contradictory?
> 
> I don't think that he meant it that way, hence "For one thing".  I'm
> fairly certain that I spoke for him in my long explanation, but he'll
> have to speak for himself.

I have nothing to object to your explanation. I'm just saying that
human capacity is besides the point here. Lojban grammar allows 
lots of humanly umparsable sentences anyway. And in this particular
case, the proposed new structure {le broda je le brode} already
exists for {joi}, so the objection on those grounds does not make 
sense.  

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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