[lojban] Re: gleki xisri'i

["Cyril Slobin" <cyril@slobin.pp.ru>]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 6:29 AM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:

> The problem is that there *is* grammatical ambiguity: the sentence
> *could* be an error;

If one counts the ambiguities with could-be errors, than any and every phrase
is ambiguous. And any sequence of lojban words become valid if one just says
that someone forgot lo'u..le'u around it. ;-)

> nu le broda broda KU KEI is perfectly valid, it's just
> not a valid Lojban utterance by itself.

It is not, we need bridi inside nu..KEI, not sumti.

> Saying that the parser will find *some* valid parse if it exists
> strikes me as expanding Lojban rather a lot.

When I read the word "if no ambiguity occurs", I treat it like
"if parser found two or more parses, then the phrase is wrong;
but if exactly one can be found, it's OK".

> I imagine that figuring out that "nu le broda broda" means "nu le broda KU
> broda KEI" in real time would *really* suck.  I don't think a human could
> keep up.

I agree. I do not suggest to change the rules, I am trying to say that we need
a better explanation of "the innermost the longest" rule. In fact we need *some*
explanation of this rule: it is a common lojban lore, but I haven't seen it
written explicitly in CLL or elsewhere. And I believe that the
explanation should
*not* refer to YACC, LALR, and other low-level tech details. We must found a way
to explain this in the language terms.

-- 
http://slobin.pp.ru/ `When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said,
<cyril@slobin.pp.ru> `it means just what I choose it to mean'


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