[lojban] Re: experimental cmavo in lojgloss.

["Daniel Brockman" <daniel@brockman.se>]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

Granted.

> > 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.

That's not what I meant by "error".  It doesn't matter.

> > For example, the #jbosnu channel accepts only grammatically correct Lojban.
>
> Interesting, I didn't know that. What parser does it use?

I'm not sure.  If I were to guess, I'd say jbofi'e.

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

In speech, it would be useful.  On IRC, it wouldn't.

> 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?

Probably not with your more restricted grammar and feature set.

> 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.

How do you separate one "text" from another?

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

You will lose a bunch of things you can do with {le'ai} then:

 * Distinguish between insertions and vague mistakes.
 * Distinguish between deletions and vague corrections.
 * Distinguish between null replacements and vague replacements.
 * Ask about the replacement with {le'ai pei} ("did you mean ...?").
 * Deny the replacement with {le'ai nai} ("I really meant ..." or just "sic").
 * Express doubt about a used expression with {le'ai cu'i}.
 * Switch around the order of mistake and correction.

--
Daniel Brockman
daniel@brockman.se