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.
lojbab
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