Re: [lojban] The efficacy of Lojban's grammar.

[Oren <get.oren@gmail.com>]

.i ti casnu cu culno lo lisri verji'i .a'uru'e

"Let usage decide" has a really good interpretation: base arguments
off of significant evidence.

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 21:51, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 using
>>> Lojban;
>>
>> 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.
>
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