Subject: [lojban] Re: What the heck is this crap?

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 02:36:21 -0000

xod:
> On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, And Rosta wrote:
> 
> > Of course, if the zo'e is left implicit, you don't know whereabouts it
> > should be inserted relative to other sumti, so the problem arises only
> > for explicit zo'e 
> 
> Ah, great! (Sarcasm.) So your solution is to add another rule: that
> implicit zo'e != explicit zo'e 

Is that adding another rule? It's plain fact that explicit zo'e has
a position and that implicit zo'e doesn't. We also know that position
can affect interpretation. If explicit zo'e had to behave as if its
position didn't matter, this would be an exception, and would require
a rule to state it.

> > I don't see why you're reacting with such horror. People are always
> > discovering issues like this that nobody has thought of before. It's
> > inevitable that this happens 
> 
> You don't understand because you've never tried to converse in Lojban 
> Whenever you compose bridi, you have minutes in which to do so; not
> seconds 

But I wouldn't expect you or (hypothetically) me or anyone, when
*speaking* Lojban, to get the scope right, or even, for that matter,
to get uncontroversial things like terminators right. For one thing,
getting stuff right generally requires forethought, and spontaneous
speech is not at all a forethoughty medium. For another thing,
speaking imposes enormous processing demands on us, and we can't
expect ourselves or others to get it right, though we can hope with
practice to get better at it. If you study transcriptions of 
spontaneous spoken natural language, you'll see that it is incredibly 
disfluent, broken, ungrammatical -- that's in the very nature of 
spontaneous speech.

I don't think it's reasonable to complain that Lojban has ways of
being precise and unambiguous. But it might be reasonable to 
complain that it doesn't have ways of explicitly fudging logical
structure when you the speaker know that your mind is too overloaded
to be sure of getting it right. We could dream up some experimental
cmavo to mark such fudging, if we think it is desirable to do so.

--And.