Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Oops, I hit send too quickly.  I had a

At 03:41 PM 02/18/2000 -0500, Robert A. McIvor wrote:
 >... [last post]

> >There is no complete dictionary of predicates.
>
>There has been for years a computerized dictionary not only of predicates
>but of most currently used words.  I cannot say 'all' as writers can add to
>the list at any time, and new versions of the dictionary come out only 
>occasionally.  I believe Loglan is ahead of Lojban in this regard.

We can hope that some form of this becomes available on the web page.  All 
parts of our draft dictionary are so available.

> >>  I don't think there exists a full grammer. At least I haven't seen one.
>
>There is a published grammar which is conflict free in YACC, and which
>parses all currently well-formed Loglan sentences.  I believe it is published
>on the Loglan web site.

The posted grammar is Trial 80 from 1994.

The posted YACC grammar does not include the lexer/preparser, which 
contains (or hides) a substantial amount of grammar.  As of the last 
version I had access to (and Trial 80's comments suggest that this is 
true), I could write any random string of LWs (cmavo), precede it by a word 
for a number and omit the space, and the entirety becomes a number 
compound.  Likewise for a tense and probably some other compounds.  In 
effect it means that there is no number or tense grammar since not all 
spaces are lexemic pauses.  I understand that you RAM have tried to do some 
work on this problem, but it seems to be a large problem with unknowable 
side effects until the result is seen.  More than half of the Lojban 
grammar is the YACC-encoded lexer grammar and the MEX grammar which in our 
case is no longer primarily a lexer construct, and a large percentage of 
our changes during the years before baselining involved the working out of 
bugs in that grammar.

I think it is the undefinedness of the tense and MEX grammar and other 
compounds that most Lojbanists mean when they refer to the TLI Loglan 
grammar being incomplete.

>I suppose
> >one could simply make a new Loglan which is identical to lojban in
> >grammer, but has the Loglan words instead. That would be nearly
> >painless for Loglanders and would be fairly straightforward.
> >
>         Since Loglan is not baselined, I am sure we would accept changes
>to the grammar that we could be convinced were desirable for whatever
>reason.

That is indeed an approach.  Technically, you could adopt Lojban in its 
entirety as a global change to the language and it would be legitimate.

I won't hold my breath.  zo'o (soi crano)

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)