Re: [lojban] Re: META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Nick Nicholas scripsit:

> I was about to fulminate "what a dumbass grammar rule", but the worst of it
> is, no, it's an eminently sensible grammar rule: --- you do want to be able
> to say {ci .a vo prenu}. (Though I'd completely forgotten that you could.)

Almost.  You have to say "vei ci .a vo [ve'o] prenu", because a quantifier
has to be either a simple number or a *parenthesized* mekso.

> The thing about {li 20 .enai li 18}, of course, is that it *would* be
> correct... if Lojban wasn't LALR1. A human knows, since .enai is followed
> by {li}, what is being joined.

What is ungrammatical about li 20 .enai li 18
is the gardenpath resulting from elided lo'o.

> And of course, I never liked LALR1 for a
> human language, which is why I also don't like {ku joi}.

These problems have nothing to do with LALR1, but rather with the handling
of elidable terminators as recoverable parser errors.

-- 
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
   at the front desk.           |          check your assumptions at the door.
     --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan