Robin Lee Powell, On 10/04/2010 04:59:
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:15:11AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:Probably the most fundamentally unnatural and perhaps even 'uncognizable' part of Lojban is the formal grammar. The structures of the formal grammar are nothing like those found in natural languages. And I rather doubt whether anybody does or can internalize the formal grammar as part of learning and usingLojban;When I'm in practice, my statements pass the formal parser (mine, not the official on) on the order of 95 times out of a hundred. I'd wager real money on that. Certainly 8 or 9 out of 10 is true for all the serious speakers on IRC. I'm really not sure what you're on about here.
I don't doubt that the great majority of expert Lojban speakers' utterances are passed as licit by the formal parser. But I do doubt that the licitness of those utterances is due to the Lojban speaker having internalized the formal grammar and making active use of it during sentence processing. I wager that syntactic structures that would be assigned to Lojban sentences by (1) syntacticians and (2) Lojban speakers would differ very substantially from the syntactic structures assigned by the formal grammar. This is partly because the trees (structures) generated by the formal grammar are very unlike anything found in human language, and partly because human language syntax is the interface with semantic interpretation, and the formal Lojban syntax isn't. The situation is rather as though human speakers when faced with an impossibly inhuman grammar construct internally an entirely new, human language with approximately equivalent weak generative capacity (i.e. gives thumbs up and down to the same candidate sentences as the formal grammar does). --And. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.