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Re: [lojban] Re: Questions about Lojban




On 28/01/2015 07:34, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:

2015-01-28 1:36 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>:
Every utterance of Lojban (in particular, though the goal goes back to Loglan) can be shown grammatical in only one way, it has a unique parse. (And presumably a correct one, that is one that corresponds perfectly to that underlying proposition from which the sentence is derived by the selection of rules peculiar to this language. Whatever the fate of the monoparsing claim is at the moment, this second point – which is the interesting one for refuting the Hypothesis – is not demonstrated.)

Please, note that as I showed earlier what is definitely "different parses of the same sentence" in English still can be achieved in Lojban. I mean "I saw a plane flying over Zurich" example.
The precisely ambiguous version {mi pu viska lo vinji ca lo nu lo se xivei pa a re no'a cu vofli ga'u la tsurix} is a perfect Lojban.
It both means "I saw a plane while I was flying over Zurich" and "I saw a plane while it was flying over Zurich".

So your claim about "monoparsing" has to be clarified.
See reply above showing more of this example.

«I saw a plane flying over Zurich» can be rendered as {mi puku viska lo vinji ca lo nu (zo'e) vofli pa'o lo gapru la .tsurix.}; this Lojban sentence is structurally unambiguous, but leaves explicitly the identity of the flying thing to the context (zo'e vofli). As for the English sentence, in addition to not being clear about what is flying, it's parse tree is ambiguous, "flying over Zurich" could either attach to "a plane" (as an adjective would do), or act as an adverbial (targetting the proposition "I saw a plane" as a whole, if I'm not mistaken).

As for the Lojban sentence proposed by Gleki, {mi puku viska lo vinji ca lo nu lo se xi vei pa .a re no'a cu vofli ga'u la .tsurix.}, it can be simplified to {mi puku viska lo vinji ca lo nu ri .a mi vofli ga'u la .tsurix.}, which is similar to what I suggested but having «me and/or the aircraft» as the flying thing; this is also structurally unambiguous, and very explicitly not saying what exactly is flying (me, the aircraft or both?).

mi'e la .ilmen. mu'o


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