On 9/4/2014 10:58 AM, TR NS wrote:
Was wondering why "left-grouping rule" was chosen as the default for tanru? I ran though random examples of using two adjectives in my head and they are almost always right-grouping. "big red truck", "bright yellow star", "little lost ant", there are exceptions, like "dark roast coffee", but even then the right-grouping would be okay. But in the other examples left-grouping would be just flat wrong.
The short answer is that Lojban has that default because TLI Loglan had that default, and we weren't trying to change anything without a good reason.
Why that default for Loglan? John Clifford may know for certain, since he predates nearly everyone living in his work on the language, but my wife believes that the reason is that mathematical grouping defaults to left grouping for the same operator, and also that left grouping is easiest to parse as you go along. But JCB did attempt to analyze all possible groupings to ensure that all were well-representable in Loglan (his attempts were incomplete, since he had only 16 of the 24 possible groupings, but the complete set was eventually worked out. IIRC, John was actively involved in that solution.)
The problem was called the "pretty little girls school" (PLGS) problem because there are ways to read that phrase that invoke most or all of the possible groupings.
In the Lojban design era, we extended the analysis to longer strings (eventually "pretty little girls school house door knob") with much more convoluted possibilities, but I doubt that any documentation remains of that analysis.
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