[lojban] Re: "la" rule

[John E Clifford <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

--- Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 10:33:04AM -0800, John E Clifford wrote:
> > Will someone please remind me what horrible things happen if we
> > simply drop the restriction on cmene and make no other changes
> > (that is, live as we do now -- with no reported problems).  We
> > might take a vocative as a sumti or, less likely, a sumti as a
> > vocative.  
> 
> We lose audio-visual isomorphism; la .stivn.laitl. would sound like
> "la stivn lai tl".

I don't see this one: lastIvn.lAItl. is letter perfect for the pronunciation.  The problem seems,
at worst, to be that of lexing the stream: {lastIvn lAItl} may be a vocative or calling to
Lasteven or it may be a sumti (as apparently intended) (Of course, I wonder whether we remember
that obligatory pause in the middle (we don't at least as often as we do, I'd say on the basis of
limited observation). (I don't think  the {lAItl} can be read as a sumti {lai tl}).
 
> > Clearly, humans sort these out, shouldn't the parser do
> > so as well? 
> 
> ...
> 
> Short answer: "No; machine recognition of ambiguous languages is
> AI-hard."

But here the range of ambiguity is so small as to allow a short dirty run through alternatives  --
or so it seems intuitively.

> -Robin
> 
> -- 
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