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Re: [lojban] The White Knight (Through the Looking Glass)
la .xorxes. cu cusku
Nice work. I have a couple of comments:
The ungrammatical incomplete sentence in lu-li'u quotes makes me much
more uncomfortable than if it was an incomplete sentence standing on its
own. It's understandable when a sentence is ungrammatical because the
speaker didn't finish it, because they were interrupted, got sidetracked
or whatever, but it's different when the missing words are not at the
end of the sentence, i.e. in this case when "li'u" appears in an
ungrammatical position. I don't know what the general answer should be
for how to quote interrupted sentences (you obviously felt as I do that
lo'u-le'u as a cop-out is unsatisfying), but in this case you could just
avoid the issue by using "i jo nai" instead of "go nai ... gi ..."..
Right. I think I first had {... go nai klaku gi co'e li'u}, but while
that maintains grammaticality it doesn't really correspond to being
interrupted mid-speech (or just stopping etc). Just like you I don't
know what the best general solution would be; I feel like there should
be a way to have an ungrammatical chunk inside grammatical text without
making the entire text parsefail. I don't know how one would parse human
speech otherwise, which is going to be full of incomplete sentences. One
thing that could help is to add a lot more productions to the fragment
rule of the grammar. Another solution I pondered involved giving EOF
some magic powers so that it can make incomplete sentences parse up to
the failure part and just treat the remainder as some sort of
meaningless left-over. What's important is that the grammatical part of
such a sentence still gets parsed properly.
I'm not sure about the equally likely case where the mistake happens in
the middle of a sentence. Perhaps an external statistical analyser would
have to guess what was meant and make corrections accordingly...
lo'u-le'u doesn't satisfy me, because 1) it requires you to know in
advance that a sentence or text will be ungrammatical (and it's an ugly
give-away in a written story), and 2) because text in error quotes does
not get parsed, so there is no way to extract meaning from what is said.
The second comment is about "ba'e" in:
-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra ba'e cmene lo cmene
Assuming the emphasis marks the rheme/comment as opposed to the
theme/topic, I would expect the "ba'e" on the second cmene. The first
cmene just repeats Alice's sentence, so it's not what the White Knight
is correcting. I understand the sentence structure is somewhat different
in Lojban than in the original, but the "ba'e" there just sounds off to me.
I know exactly what you mean. When I read the Lojban I had the same
feeling, so I went over to the English and found that it was "backwards"
as well. {ba'e} on the second {cmene} definitely feels better, I just
wasn't sure if I should make a "correction" to the original or if it fit
the general weirdness in Alice.
mi'e la selpa'i mu'o
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