On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 12:29 PM, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote: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.
OK maybe I'm starting to understand your complaint. I'm starting to agree (ha, I guess since we're speaking English I'm speaking Lojban accented English) that "monoparsing" isn't a good _expression_ of the most important difference. What's essential is that the structure is determined entirely by the selma'o tree and not by cmavo knowing about the semantics or even the structure of other parts of the sentence around them.
For instance an example of one sort of cmavo we wouldn't have would be a cmavo that accepts a selbri if it follows a plant name but a sumti if it follows an animal name. The cmavo can't know the semantics of their context-- semantically agnostic parsing, you could call it.
But also perhaps even more difficult to describe, we probably wouldn't have a cmavo that accepts a selbri if it's on the main level vs a sumti if it's in an embedded bridi. We definitely wouldn't have a cmavo that acts differently if there's a BAI attached somewhere else in the same bridi. Each cmavo has no sense at all of any elsewhere existing. Even on that syntax level there's some sort of locality that's enforced. I don't know any good name for that condition? I'm not sure if we're even very clear on exactly what the rules are, for instance {cu'au} interestingly violates some assumptions there and so it constitutes an interesting edge case.
I'm not sure what to call it, but here's a rule that I think demonstrates many of these properties: You can substitute any word for any other word of the same selma'o (or any other brivla in the case of brivla) and the parse tree of the sentence necessarily stays identical.
<3,
telselkik--
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