Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing

2015-02-03 21:08 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com>:

I remain unclear about the point of all this. It appears that the ambiguity of "ambiguity" is at the heart of the matter. Lojban claims to be anamphibolous, free from *syntactic* ambiguity. That is, every valid Lojban sentence has exactly one parse (and, furthermore, is the correct one, but this is not yet examined, let alone claimed). This does not prevent (or claim to) *semantic* ambiguity, where a word or phrase has more than one meaning (in some sense -- another source of problems) even when all the syntactic information remains the same, nor *referential* ambiguity, where the meaning of an _expression_ underdetermines it referent (the classic "Flash strode up to Ming. He struck him") And there are probably more varieties. Any of these can lead us to map a sentence on to a set of more explicit propositions (pronouns replaced by names, say, times and places fixed, and so on) which constitute the range of the ambiguity of the sentence, however generated. The sample English sentence generates range of four propositions (that we are concerned with at the moment) using only syntactic ambiguity. It is claimed that the given Lojban sentence (or one like it in all relevant ways) generates the same range of ambiguities without semantic ambiguity (since it is a Lojban sentence), thus using referential or semantic ambiguities -- or some other sort not yet discussed. That is an interesting trick, especially if, as appears to be claimed, it can always be done in Lojban. But I don't see what it has to do with monoparsing (except that it is assumed in the claim).

What are the examples of polyparsing?

Is "Flash strode up to Ming. He struck him" one?

Is "Fred saw a plane flying over Zurich" one?

On Tuesday, February 3, 2015 11:29 AM, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:

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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