Re: [lojban] the myth of monoparsing

2015-02-12 18:00 GMT+03:00 v4hn <me@v4hn.de>:

First off, learn to quote properly.
This whole thread (as well as a number of other threads
you were involved in) is a mess to read.

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 04:22:52PM +0300, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> 2015-02-12 15:38 GMT+03:00 v4hn <me@v4hn.de>:
> > So, in essence, you do not question monoparsing in lojban,
> > but instead propose a new theory on how to parse natural languages.
> > Why didn't you say so right away?
>
> May be because I did say it in the first sentence of the first post of this
> thread?

> Since the original post on monoparsing as something unique or defining
> feature of Lojban provided no examples on how this monoparsing differs from
> English here is once again my full understanding using one example that is
> monoparsed both in English and Lojban:

You use your version of "monoparsing" here without explaining anything.
So, no, you did not. Whatever.

It's the same version. Monoparsing is having one syntactic tree as the result of the work of a parser.

> My complaint is (ke'usai) [about]
> <quote>monoparsing as something unique or defining feature of Lojban</quote>

Ok, it seems to be of no relevance to you at all.

What seems not be of relevance to me? I disagree with a statement.

That's your opinion, so, for me and a number of others on this list,
it's just another "Someone is wrong on the internet". http://xkcd.com/386/
I consider implemented and usable monoparsing to be
one of the most important features of lojban.

No, not Lojban but its parsers.

Please, differentiate between languages and tools to analyze them.

> This is like comparing sweet with red. If both parsers could be aligned we
> would see monoparsing (or polyparsing) in both languages.
> [...]
> It seems to me that monoparsing is not a defining feature of Lojban and in
> fact it's quite natural for most languages to be monoparsed in most cases

That's untying knots with a sword.
"Every sentence (regardless the language) monoparses
because all of its ambiguity is hidden in its structure."
helps no one, but sure, you can go there.

For me, the crutial difference between your {poi vofli} sentence and
the English "flying" sentence is that you need a zero-morpheme to "gleki-monoparse"
the latter one,

English parsers inject zero-morphemes all the time to avoid problems.

I don't see why this can't be done this time.

where the first one moves the structure ambiguity
to a semantic level. Your argumentation here pe'i seems analogous to saying that
"Fred saw a plane while he flew over Zurich or he saw a plane that flew over Zurich"
is the same as "Fred saw a plane flying over Zurich".
This is not the case w.r.t. parsing. W.r.t. utterance analysis they are also quite
different, as Grice tells us that if somebody spends so many words on making
the uncertainty in this sentence explicit (instead of identifying one interpretation),
either the uncertainty is quite important or the speaker is a linguist...

Not all languages show ambiguity in this example.

Thus no language can be concise in showing syntactic vagueness.

And that's why English is unlucky that its structure is expressed using {se xi vei mo'e zo'e} which you may consider breaking Gricean principles.

One can imagine a shortcut for this {se xi vei mo'e zo'e} but we differentiate between parsing (which requires adding new words to show the sturucture of a sentence) and live Lojban that isn't going to imitate any natlangs.

> No example has been shown of how can monoparsing be never reached in
> natlangs if compared to how Lojban parses them.

I can't even parse that sentence properly, so I'm not sure what kind of
"example" you want as proof that something cannot be done.

Which sentence? With Fred? You can't or English parser can't?

> No wonder that such myths are spread without any corroboration from real
> English and Lojban grammars and examples.

You can call everything a myth,
but when it punches you in your stomach,
it will still hurt.

If a person utters claims without proofs then yes, it hurts.

> I'm replying to the idea of monoparsing:
> "monoparsing is the essential Lojban virtue."
> [ http://pckipo.blogspot.ru/2014/06/lojban-is-monoparsing.html ]
>
> As I showed it is not an essential Lojban virtue.

You didn't. It's your opinion.

> It's an essential feature (not even virtue) of current Lojban parsers,
> although this may change in future [...]

Everything you proposed in this thread to make lojban "polyparse"
is about semantic analysis, not about parsing.

Adding polyparsing to Lojban is possible by removing some parts of its grammar and it has nothing to do with semantic analysis.

Last message from me in this thread,

v4hn

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