[lojban] Re: [Llg-members] nu ningau so'u se jbovlaste / updating a few jbovlaste entries

[moving this off llg-members list]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 9:47 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
On 20 Jan 2015 08:41, "guskant" <gusni.kantu@gmail.com> wrote:
> I still don't understand how a definition of the term "language" could
> bring any damage to Lojban,

It's because it saddles Lojban with a formal grammar, which, since formal grammars aren't ingredients of human languages, serves as an impediment, a useless encumbrance, and lacks an explicit actual grammar, possession of which should be a sine qua non for a loglang. (To Usagists, this is not really relevant, because for them the True Grammar would be the implicit actual grammar that inheres in usage.) It's a remediable situation: BPFK could write an explicit actual grammar, and the formal grammars could be discarded as the worthless junk they are. (Not everything in the formal grammar is worthless junk, of course; some of it would be the basis for the actual grammar.) Maybe the formal grammar plus Martin's Tersmu might jointly be tantamount to an actual grammar, but the formal grammar bit deviates gratuitously from the syntax of human languages and could not ever plausibly be a model of an actual speaker's syntax. (I think Robin once said he believed he did use the formal grammar when spontaneously producing and comprehending utterances, but if that is true then I think he must have been using raw brute force brain power, rather than the human language faculty.)
Would it be fair to say that what an actual grammar should do is, given some input of sound or written characters, tell us how to:

(1) convert the input into a string of phonemes
(2) convert the string of phonemes into a string of words
(3) determine a tree structure for the string of words
(4) determine which nodes of the tree are terms, which nodes are predicates, which terms are co-referring, and which terms are arguments of which predicates

Rather:

(1') convert the input into a string [or perhaps tree] of phonemes

(2') convert the string [or perhaps tree] of phonemes into a string [or perhaps (prosodic) tree] of phonological words

(3') map the tree of phonological words to a structure of syntactic 'words'/'nodes', which structure will specify which nodes of the tree are terms, which nodes are predicates, which terms are co-referring, and which terms are arguments of which predicates

> and conversely, given a list of terms and predicate relations among them, the grammar should tell us how to put all that into a string of characters or sounds such that someone else can recover the original structure of terms and their relations from it.

Yes.

> (In addition to that, the grammar has to say how to encode/decode illocutionary force, and maybe some other things.)

As you know, I take that to be part of logicosyntactic form.

> If that's more or less on track, then we can say that the YACC/EBNF formal grammars do (3). The PEG grammar does (2) and (3). Martin's tersmu is trying to do (4). I would agree that the way our formal grammars do (3) is probably not much like the way our brains do (3), but I'm not sure I see what alternative we have.

Right. So I think (3) is not a valid step. (3') should be doable, partly from Tersmu and partly by using some natural language formalism to analyse the syntax (e.g. at minimum make all phrases headed and forbid unary branching; binary branching would be a bonus if it could be managed).

> The way I understand what guskant's concern is, is that we should provide lojban definitions for words in such a way as to facilitate (4).

Yes, I think everyone would agree with that.

--And.