Re: [lojban] Named multiples

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed something on that page that I didn't understand.  Why get rid of
> sa?  What could be more clear than "take next word and erase all previous
> words back to the last occurrence of the following word"?  What confusions
> arise from this definition/usage?  Or maybe I'm confusing sa with su

ma'oste: "erase complete or partial utterance; next word shows how
much erasing to do."

CLL: "The cmavo following ``sa'' should be the starting marker of some
grammatical construct. The effect of the ``sa'' is to erase back to
and including the last starting marker of the same kind."

YACC: "If the word ``sa'' (selma'o SA) is identified, erase it and all
preceding text as far back as necessary to make what follows attach to
what precedes. (This rule is hard to formalize and may receive further
definition later.)"

EBNF: "null = utterance SA"

None of those rules are very clear. One suggested implementation was
to delete back to the preceding occurence of some word of the same
selma'o as the word that follows. Another suggested implemantation was
to select some constructs such that they are eligible for SA-deletion.
Your proposed rule may be clear, but it is difficult to implement from
a formal perspective (because the number of possible words, unlike the
number of selma'o, is infinite). It could probably be done with a
similar trick to the one used for the ZOI-delimiters.

In any case, none of the rules seem to give anything very usable from
a human perspective. You may come up with some simple examples that
may seem to give something useful, but if you explore some more you
always end up with unintuitive cases.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

-- 
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.