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

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 02:51:17PM +0100, And Rosta 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.

That is certainly my internal experience.

> 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. 

I can't speak to (1), but my structures would differ significantly
only by missing parts.

> 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).

I think you're full of shit, and I'd appreciate it if you would not
continue to try to tell me what goes on in my head.

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm  thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other  than  the default  outcome?"  See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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