2010/5/19 Jorge Llambías
<jjllambias@gmail.com>
Can you give an example? ... Are
you talking about human parsing?
Yes. Let's take an example from NORALUJV.txt. I've spotted "backemselrErkru" (: it is long enough to either got out of air in the middle of it, or just need to look into the dictionary to recall the next rafsi, whatever :). Any pause after the vowel and the stressed "lrE" leaves us with "rkru" as the last rafsi, so here was some error. Any pause after the consonant will alert us about "no LA before the cmene"(not morphology level, but easy/close enough for humans). Pause after the "CVV" rafsi (not in an example), will be noticed as "no stress in previous word". Only in "la backemselrErkru" the pause between the rafsi's will go unnoticed. In the cmevla, after the required LA, we do expect the sequence of names, so breaking one into several will cause almost no harm, we'll just glue them together up to the last consonant ending word.
So, we are almost immune to the extra pauses inside the long words. Now, without the required LA, we'll get:
ba.ckemselrErkru - can fail
bac.kemselrErkru - OK
back.emselrErkru - can fail
backe.mselrErkru - can fail
backem.selrErkru - OK
backems.elrErkru - can fail
backemse.lrErkru - can fail
backemsel.rErkru - OK
backemselr.Erkru - can fail
backemselrE.rkru - can fail
backemselrEr.kru - OK, can eat the next word
backemselrErk.ru - OK
backemselrErkr.u - OK
Note, that all the "fails" only "_can_ be"; if there are the otherwise _allowed_ pause after the entire word, it will parse, giving us 2 wrong meaningful chunks.
The exact same problem exists with or without the change. The
change has no relevance to word parsing.
So, the change affects an error detection. If the humans all were the reliable electronic devices with the error detection codes in the communication channel, that would be irrelevant. However they are not, and the language was meant to be "error detecting communication channel" for them.
Why would a text be full of cmevla? As you say, cmevla are a
cumbersome type of word, so they don't blend well with normal Lojban
words. Simplifying their syntax would not make them morphologically
prettier, it would only make the syntax simpler.
I do like the idea. I just looking for the bad consequences. The result of the change would be the wider usage of cmevla. Otherwise, there are no reason to make it simpler. Trying to read them aloud would push "the live language" towards toki pona (as the best case).
"." is OK in writing. Not so in speech. We do need to think/breath/rest/etc. sometimes. That sounds just as ".......". So, using "." as the syntax marker looks bad for a human-spoken audio-video isomorphic language.