[lojban] Re: Regular Language

[ianek <janek37@gmail.com>]

On Sep 3, 10:04 pm, Robin Lee Powell <rlpow...@digitalkingdom.org>
wrote:
> Wait, what?  No.  No human language is context free, they are all
> context sensitive in the chomsky hieararchy, if not actually
> unrestricted.  Seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar#Linguistic_applicat...
> for some citations on that issue.

The article you cite says:  "Gerald Gazdar and Geoffrey Pullum have
argued that despite a few non-context-free constructions in natural
language (such as cross-serial dependencies in Swiss German[3] and
reduplication in Bambara[5]), the vast majority of forms in natural
language are indeed context-free."
Also it says that Chomsky's arguments were disproved. Now the only
argument for non-CFG-ness of natural languages is 'cause Chomsky said
so. But he's not omniscient.

I personally believe that most natural languages are regular. Yes,
regular. I've not seen non-regular constructs for, say, English, which
don't break for nesting greater than 2. Consider this sequence:
1. The rat likes cheese.
2. The rat the cat chased likes cheese.
3. The rat the cat the dog bit chased likes cheese.
4. The rat the cat the dog the frog scared bit chased likes cheese.
Sentences 3 and 4 are incomprehensible heard and hard to comprehence
read. And all constructs I know allowing comprehensible sentences of
arbitrary length are indeed regular.

On Sep 4, 3:23 am, Stela Selckiku <selck...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Graham Morehead
>
> <graham.moreh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > No human can understand a sentence of infinite length anyway.
>
> I strongly disagree!  Run on sentences can get somewhat confusing in
> natlangs, but they're perfectly comprehensible in Lojban.

There's a Polish novel "The Gates of Paradise",
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates_of_Paradise
> The novel consists of 40,000 words written in two sentences with nearly no punctuation, making it an exercise in constrained writing. The second sentence contains only five words (I szli całą noc, "And they marched all night").

I've seen it and it's entirely comprehensible, not confusing at all.

On Sep 4, 8:39 am, Robin Lee Powell <rlpow...@digitalkingdom.org>
wrote:
> That's fascinating, because people seem to have no problem
> internalizing Lojban's elidable terminators, which as I'd said don't
> seem to be CFG-able (at least in a sane number of rules).

But consider that they're highly confusing at times, eg. when it comes
to "kei kei kei". Personally I think that's because people are
accustomed to use a constant memory (so there's no stack) for language
processing, and let me remind you what class of languages is parsable
in constant memory.

mu'o mi'e ianek

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