[lojban] Re: Do jbopre use terminators? (was: Is Lojban a CFG?)

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

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 12:27:17PM -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
> On 7/12/06, Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> >I find the general idea interesting; I'm going to have to ponder
> >it a bit.  I think, though, that most people would rather the
> >parser reject a sentence like:
> >
> >le nu le gleki prenu klama cinri
> >
> >rather than turn it into the equivalent of:
> >
> >le nu le gleki ku prenu ku klama cinri
> >
> >when the user obviously intended:
> >
> >le nu le gleki prenu ku klama ku cinri
> >
> >This (the current behaviour) seems to me to reduce the chances
> >for confusion *substantially*.  But then I haven't thought about
> >it much yet.
> 
> That's an interesting example, because it really *is* obvious what
> the speaker intended. 

In this case, yes.  Try "le xekri blanu".  Is that the answer to a
question (i.e. a single sumti), or a statement?

> I wonder: Let's say Lojban came to be used by a sizable number of
> people for everyday communication. People would probably sometimes
> mistakenly leave out terminators like that, especially when the
> listener can easily fill them back in. Most times they would be
> understood, and the error might even go unnoticed. 

Yes, this happens already on IRC (although it's usually swiftly
corrected).

> Because strictly unnecessary grammar tends to evolve out of a
> language, this tendency would probably increase over time. So
> would these required elidable terminators (is that the right
> term?) eventually come to be used only in contexts where the
> listener would have trouble semantically "fixing" the statement
> (probably still much of the time), and left out when the meaning
> is obvious (perhaps only occasionally)? If this happened, would
> speakers retain the ability to include them all easily, if needed?

No idea.  An interesting thought, though.

-Robin

-- 
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