[lojban] Re: lojgloss and linebreaks

["Chris Capel" <pdf23ds@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm using alice as a source of stuff to translate to test my
> parser/glosser. When alice starts a new HTML paragraph, the official
> parser doesn't say that it's starting a new lojban paragraph. For
> that, NIhO is required. Is a NIhO implied by an HTML paragraph break?
> "la nicte cadzu", on the other hand, mostly starts new text paragraphs
> with {ni'o}, but there are numerous exceptions which might have some
> meaning. (Half a {ni'o}?)
>
> Conventionally, casually, I think a paragraph break in text (or a
> double-linebreak in plain text) does imply a new paragraph, and I'll
> probably treat it as such whether or not it's technically accurate.
> But I was wondering if the convention had any formal backing.

I think that, really, what I'm confused about here is the meaning of
{ni'o}, which really isn't something you can blame me too much for,
because the grammar's production for statements between {ni'o} is
"paragraph", which is really quite misleading. A paragraph is a
*visual* unit in written text used to denote a group of statements on
the same topic, *or* used to visually break up a long stream of text
on one topic. So that production really shouldn't be called
"paragraph". Perhaps "topic" would work, but I'm not sure that's
totally accurate either. Then again, production names that are english
word aren't always totally accurate in their connotations.

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)


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