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Re: [lojban] Re: Questions about Lojban


2015-01-28 20:03 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>:
 This is a grammatical fact which gives rise to a practical uncertainty: which proposition is being asserted, roughly,  "When I was flying over Zurich, I saw a plane"  or "I saw a plane when it was flying over Zurich".  Lojban cannot create this uncertainty in the same way, since it cannot produce an amphibolous sentence, so, if it wants to create the same (or a practically similar) uncertainty, it must say, in effect "When either I or a plane were flying over Zurich, I saw the plane".  Same uncertainty, but no amphiboly.  (It is not quite the same uncertainty, since tgis asserts a definite proposition, whereas the original English failed to actually assert one, only presenting two possibilities, neither of them really put forward.)

And even in
{mi pu viska lo vinji ca lonu lo se xi vei mo'e zo'e no'a cu vofli ga'u la tsurix}
you see uncertainty but not amphiboly?
What is put forward here now? Again uncertainty? Then why can't the English sentence be perceived exactly the same way as creating uncertainty to which sumti the clause links to?

Why should we call the same thing "ambiguous parse" in one case and uncertainty in the other case?
Why not say that in this aspect English is as uncertain as Lojban and not ambiguous?

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