[lojban] Re: experimental cmavo in lojgloss.

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:32 AM, Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> wrote:
>
> Experienced Lojbanists are relatively unlikely to make blatant grammatical
> errors.
> They remain (depending on character, I suppose) prone to making all sorts of
> mistakes,
> grammatical or otherwise.

I guess the most likely error for a fluent speaker should be a typo. A
typo is likely to result in ungrammatical text or grammatical but with
an uninteded structure, though in some cases it can result in a text
with the same structure if the typo doesn't change the selma'o of the
word.

> As a result, the {le'ai} construct is often employed to make
> corrections even when there are no grammatical *errors* anywhere in sight.

A text that parses with an unintended parse tree is a grammatical
error by the speaker, even if the text on its own is grammatically
valid. It is as bad as one that does not parse, or perhaps even worse
because it could be misleading without announcing that something is
wrong.

> For example, the #jbosnu channel accepts only grammatically correct Lojban.

Interesting, I didn't know that. What parser does it use?

>  Hence,
> you may not use {le'ai} constructions there.  But that would be useful to
> correct mistakes,
> despite the fact that grammatical mistakes are not even allowed in the first
> place.

OK, what jbosnu seems to require is a construction like:

correction <- (!SAhAI any-word)* SAhAI any-word*

which constitutes a whole utterance all by itself. Any number of words
(grammatical or not) followed by any number of words (grammatical o
not). It would appear at the text level:

text <- correction / ...

Why would it be useful to be able to embed this construction in the
midst of some other utterance?

If the correction is not going to be used by the parser to fix
anything, embedding it in a formally broken text won't work, because
it will never be detected. Would it be of any use to embed it in a
formally unbroken but effectively uninterpretable or incorrectly
interpretable text?

In other words, this construction as you are using it is used to make
a comment about some other text, it's about how some other text should
be fixed, not about the text it appears in.

If that's the case, only SAhAI is required, because there is no need
to separate the construction from anything else.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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