Re: [lojban] {la .alis.} book

[Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>]

On 29 May 2015, at 08:00, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@GMAIL.COM> wrote:

>>> Lojban's design is not at all optimized to make life easy for its learners or speakers. Its users could adopt conventions that eschew many elements of its design, in order to make life easier for its users, but that requires a consensus in usage and entails a de facto repudiation of those many elements eschewed.
>> 
>> Logical referents but semilogical structure? Okay.
> 
> In what way  is it semi-logical? What is logical for you?
> Lojban is logical mostly in a sense that it is easily parsable.

I guess I thought of lu/li’u and sei/se’u like opening and closing parentheses and having open parentheses in the language for both of those pairs but mandatory closing parentheses only for one of them doesn’t seem consistent. 

> {sei} and bridi tails have different grammar. The selbri itself terminates {sei}-clause, thus the end of {sei}-clause is 100%-predictable. When the selbri is encountered it's the signal that {sei}-clause just ended.

Only if you know what a selbri is (or whether or not a given word is a selbri). And that means knowledge of the language, unless selbris are identifiable by their syllable structure or something. If not, then external knowledge must be there to identify the members of a class called selbri.

By the way as a linguist I find Lojban to be completely opaque in not using words like verb or noun or adjective. 

At the same time, the argument/predicate thing (and the sentence tree) makes no sense to me at all, and just reminds me of the horror of generative grammar. :-O

But, Gleki, if you want to work with me on this I think it would be fun, and wouldn’t take so much time perhaps. 

> > sei/se'u is regular; it just is regular according to rules less simple than you would prefer.
> 
> Well, it does make it impossible to apply punctuation automatically, since the only way that one could do so is to have a script that would parse a variable-lengths string following “sei” to find the word of the selbri class. Not that the application of punctuation is a goal of Lojban.
> 
> I see,  so you want to put European-like punctuation at the end of {sei}-clauses. This is certainly possible. Are you planning to publish any other books apart from Alice?

Could do, if it is fun. :-)

> If yes, then it's a matter of several patches to existing parsers to output such punctuation. Instead of " SEhU-clause?" we'll just have " (SEhU-clause / { ' – ' } ) “.

So the parser can identify a selbri?

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/

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