Re: [lojban] The White Knight (Through the Looking Glass)

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 6:46 AM, selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

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.

Right, human speech is obviously not parsed as a single chunk. The Lojban parser is somewhat unnatural in that sense.

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.

It wouldn't be EOF though, because we still want to keep parsing what comes after the incomplete sentence. The PEG can be modified so as to allow incomplete sentences, but it means adding a lot of rules.

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...

I would say mistakes are different from interruptions, so they probably require different treatments.

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.

Right.

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.

I don't think the original has the same problem, because in the English you have "the name" and "is called", and the White Knight's "the name" does repeat Alice's "the name", and "is called" is the new information. The problem with the Lojban is that there's two "cmene", and the one that is new information comes first and in the same position as Alice's "cmene". If it was a different word, say:

-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra ba'e sinxa lo cmene

or:

-.i ri cmene lo selsa'a ku xu
- na go'i .i do na jimpe .i ra lo cmene cu ba'e sinxa

then it would be easier to follow, because it would be more clear that "lo cmene" is "lo cmene be lo selsa'a". (I'm not saying it would be a better translation though.)

Also the way you have "xu" questioning "lo selsa'a" may add to the garden-pathing. I think "vau xu" would correspond more closely to the original.

mu'o mi'e xorxes