Re: [lojban] A Simpler Connective System (blog article)

Since JCB through out the basic structure of FOPL on day one of the development of Loglan and decided to graft a pseudo form onto a SAE base, things like trying to simplify the conjunction system have been a matter of ever increasing complexity, interrupted occasionally by attempts to get back to the basic underlying simplicity -- with scarcely visible success. To be sure, Lojban has achieved the monoparsing with which it should have begun at the cost of Byzantine complexity (and questionable accuracy) But it seems unlikely that much reform can keep this result and cut through the mare's nest. There are those that love the complexity and the documented structure (the best documentation in the language business, after all) and -- despite occasional complaints about not getting more new people -- glory in their isolated mastery, and so they are not interested in "improvements". Mere improvers are also too tied up in the status quo to consider scrapping the mess and starting over on the right foot this time. So, changes, fueled merely be convenience or clarity, are not likely to occur. Changes that add to complexity are always welcome, of course.

On Monday, September 26, 2016 11:41 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

On 26 September 2016 at 16:04, selpahi <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

On 26.09.2016 16:43, And Rosta wrote:

Having given the matter about .0001% of the thought you have, I wonder
whether the gi'i terminator is optimal. Firstly it would not always be
easy to work out on the fly when it is and isn't elidable, so the
prudent strategy would be to leave it in except when certain it is
elidable. Secondly, when it isn't elided it adds an extra word and two
extra syllables. A better alternative would be to introduce medial
conjuncts with _go_ rather than _gi_, and use _gi_ only for introducing
final conjuncts: {ga JA A go B go C gi D}. (Or, one step neater, use
_gu_ for medial conjuncts and _go_ for the tanru coordination
introducer. Or _ge_.)

The only times {gi'i} would not be elidible is if another connective follows that is supposed to apply to the entire forethought connection to its left. In all other cases {gi'i} is elidible, because each {gi} can only devour exactly one sumti, after which the entire connection ends automatically.

Your strategy with {go} would involve much more forethought than this, because you would have to be absolutely certain that you only want to add exactly one more item.

Yes, but in designing an ergonomic loglang -- which okay, Lojban isn't and doesn't aspire to be, but we're kind of imagining if it were trying to be -- should minimizing speaker forethought be prioritized over, say, minimizing hearer backtracking, or minimizing verbosity? (I think no.)

Do you have any situations in mind where working out whether {gi'i} is elidible would not be easy?

I was thinking of {ga JA1 ga JA2 ga JA3 A gi B gi C gi D gi E gi F gi G gi H gi I gi J gi K}, which I presume would treat A--K as conjuncts of JA3, and would require two {gi'i}s (terminating JA3 and JA2) to mark the intended structure (whatever it is). Have I misunderstood? I suppose it's not hard to work out that gi'i is unelidable, so I will withdraw the first of my two objections. A reason for preferring the terminator over alternatives is that terminators are the Lojban way; but a reason for preferring terminatorless alternatives is that they can potentially involve incremental parsing without lookahead, which I think is psycholinguistically much less taxing, and that terminators are psycholinguistically alien.

--And.

Thank you for your comment.

~~~mi'e la solpa'i

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