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Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing





2015-02-03 20:19 GMT+03:00 Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>:
I don't understand at all how a Lojban sentence carefully phrased to explicitly state a particular ambiguity seems to you to share any similar basic character at all with an English sentence which has a similar ambiguity simply by randomly having a chaotic collection of ambiguities as all English sentences do. In Lojban you're able to unambiguously craft exactly the ambiguity which matches any English ambiguity, which is rather astonishingly impressive, better than anyone expected it to work before we'd really tried it. It's not that Lojban's required not to have ambiguities, or something, it's that you can state whatever ambiguities you want.

Try going the other way and matching the exact ambiguities from arbitrary Lojban sentences in English and then say again you don't see the difference. You can't just make an English sentence have exactly the ambiguities you want in order to match some other language's ambiguity structures, in English you have to crush together words with zillions of parses and just hope context is enough to pick out the sense you meant. Lojban isn't some rigid set of rules where you just get a few fixed parses or something, it's a wonderful magical flexible set of rules where you get to choose exactly what you want to express and what you don't.

u'e do melbi tcetce cusku 

I only started this to understand how monoparsing in Lojban is different from English.
If one sentence can be expanded into two distinct syntactic trees by applying precise numbers instead of imprecise {mo'e zo'e} then it's still monoparsing of course.

What makes me wonder is why English can't be called monoparsed. May be because those who described it that way felt that polyparsing was the only reasonable explanation?

Probably it doesn't even matter and some better phrasing of how Lojban really differs should be made. Probably, even based on your reply in this thread.

At least, this example led to some new ways of encoding several syntactic trees using one sentence. First, I accepted pycyn's criticism by removing OR operator and precise numbers, then And Rosta told that adverbial constructs were not the only possible explanation so I wrote this last translation.


<3,
selkik

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