Re: [lojban] Tanru automatically forming

Whoa! Is this really a proposal to have *one* cmavo for all tanru? A sort of weak 'zei'? I was expecting the old "the relation between the modifier and the modified is ambiguous" screed. Is there any real reason to do this? They already have the shortest cmavo of all, ' ', joining them. To be sure, it is used for other things as well, but each use is contextually defined and that has to be at least one such joining (maybe just concatenation, but that makes for hard reading) for a language to work at all -- we can't mark everything (because of infinite regress). So, any other tanru marker is going to make Lojban sentences (which already suffer from a lot of cmavo snow) longer, often a lot longer. And to what gain? Are there tanru that aren't recognizable as such? I suppose that there can be for us poor non-computers, as we go down some tree of subordinate arguments or whatever. But surely these are very rare and and best be handled a "WTF" -- for which there is a handy cmavo -- rather than marking all the non-problematic ones.

As long as we are not going to go to some version of full parentheses, nothing is better than what we have (which almost translates into full parentheses when used correctlly).

From: Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>

To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, December 26, 2010 1:24:46 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Tanru automatically forming

At the quoted response in particular: what? The simplest bridi would have no tanru; all the sumti would be LE GISMU, and the selbri would also be GISMU. Under this system a typical sentence would look like {lo broda brode lo brodi lo brodo}.

More generally:
From the logical perspective, this argument makes a degree of sense; saying "sumti ends here" or "predicate starts here" does make more sense than saying "tanru begins here".

However, from a cmavo count perspective, this isn't really the case; you could write an entire paragraph without ever forming a tanru, quite easily, and in the meantime the majority of the sentences would have a {cu}. The main disadvantage (and I thought about this after I sent my original email, actually) is that some select sentences wind up having a LOT of cmavo, and in fact a lot of repeated cmavo.

For default grouping in particular, there's a pretty easy fix for this that I didn't think about: have the {ja'ei} go out in front. Then you only need one {ja'ei} to group a bunch of selbri into a tanru with the default grouping. I think this would probably be necessary even when using {ke} and friends (so you'd see {ja'ei broda ke brode brodi} and so on) but maybe not.

The problem with {ja'ei} out in front is with situations that are currently treated by saying {lo broda brode cu brodi}. Then you really would be adding cmavo, because you'd have to say {lo ja'ei broda brode cu brodi}. But only in that case would you be adding cmavo; I'm fairly sure that the net number of cmavo would still be lower.

mu'o mi'e .latros.

On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 12:57 PM, Oleksii Melnyk <lamelnyk@gmail.com> wrote:

2010/12/26 Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>

{lo gerku cu klama} is more common than {lo gerku klama cu bajra}.

Even simplest bridi have only one place for "cu", but 2..6 for a tanru. So, exchanging [0..1] cu with [2..6] "ja'ei"(or whatever) is a waste of brevity.

--
mu'o mi'e lex

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