[lojban] elidable terminators [was Feedback (long, sorry)]

[jordi mas <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

> > There is no one feature in Lojban, as far as we
> know, that is not found
> > in some natural language.
> 
> Including terminators?
> 
> A spoken word indicating a quotation occurs in
> Sanskrit; but the beginning of 
> the quotation is not marked. Attitudinals occur in
> some language near the 
> India-Burma border, Lahu I think. Other examples?

You are missing the point, even if some languages 
do use markers at both ends of some sentence-pieces. 

What is unnatural about lojban terminators
is the "can be elided unless ambiguity results"
rule. I doubt any natural language does something of
the sort. 

AFAIK "truly optional" elision seems to be rare in
natural languagews. When an English grammar says that
the word "that" in the sentence "I know he went" is
elided 'optionally', that usually means in practice
that some speakers do it always and others never. Or 
that in some conditions it must and in others it
cannot. But I doubt that any natural spoken
language does use "ambiguity resulting" as
a condition. (Some written languages do that
sometimes.)

As I see it, the designers of lojban used
this unnatural feature in order to achieve
contradictory goals: unambiguous syntax,
more or less free word order,
and some sentences being as short as their English
counterparts. If they had put up with the sentence 
{mi tavla do} to be more verbose than its English
counterpart "I tell you", or allowed it 
to have a different word order, then a way
could have been found to make the syntax
unambiguous without using elidable terminators. 

Unfortunately, "ease of learning" was not given much
priority in the list of goals. 

--jordi




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