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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2



On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 8:07 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

I think I didn't make myself clear. Regarding the baselined CLL 'grammar', which is a pseudosyntax, you can either (a) reject it as irrelevant junk (-- the move I would favour) or (b) treat it as an actual syntax. If you go for (b) then the members of a syntactic category must have the same behaviour with respect to the rules that translate into logical form, and hence if {tu'a} is in LAhE syntactically then (by definition) it is in LAhE semantically.

While I agree that the baselined formal grammar is not quite a syntax in your sense, it is also not merely a pseudosyntax (just combinatorics of morphophonological forms). There is a high correlation between the morphophonological combinatorics and the logical form, even if it's not (yet?) quite perfect. For most selmaho, all of its members do have the same behaviour with regard to logical form, but it's true that some important selmaho do have many oddball members (the most egregious probably being UI or PA).

Actually, (a) and (b) presuppose that we are describing a language, but there's also option (c), which is to describe something that isn't actually a language but nevertheless involves a set of rules mapping pseudosyntax to logical form. I guess (c) is what you're actually doing, which as an intellectual exercise is fair enough.

There may also be a middle road between rejecting the formal grammar as irrelevant junk and treating it as a masterpiece that can't be touched: treat it as a first draft that needs to be modified here and there to become closer to a real syntax. In the particular case of "tu'a" in LAhE, for example, we can just create two subselmaho LAhE1 and LAhE2 which share the same morphophonological combinatorics but differ (slightly) in the logical form behind them. 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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