Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 06:27:00 -0400 (EDT)

Nick Nicholas scripsit:

> I was about to fulminate "what a dumbass grammar rule", but the worst of it
> is, no, it's an eminently sensible grammar rule: --- you do want to be able
> to say {ci .a vo prenu}. (Though I'd completely forgotten that you could.)

Almost. You have to say "vei ci .a vo [ve'o] prenu", because a quantifier
has to be either a simple number or a *parenthesized* mekso.

> The thing about {li 20 .enai li 18}, of course, is that it *would* be
> correct... if Lojban wasn't LALR1. A human knows, since .enai is followed
> by {li}, what is being joined.

What is ungrammatical about li 20 .enai li 18
is the gardenpath resulting from elided lo'o.

> And of course, I never liked LALR1 for a
> human language, which is why I also don't like {ku joi}.

These problems have nothing to do with LALR1, but rather with the handling
of elidable terminators as recoverable parser errors.

-- 
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan [email-masked]
Please leave your values | Check your assumptions. In fact,
at the front desk. | check your assumptions at the door.
--sign in Paris hotel | --Miles Vorkosigan