Subject: [lojban] Re: cmegadri valfendi preti

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 14:35:51 +0100

And Rosta:
> Nora to pier:
> > I realize
> > you are trying to enlarge the area of acceptable names, but (aside from
> > the fact that I support the existing definition as baseline) I think you
> > are
> > doing the LISTENERS a disservice if you wish to have such things as
> > {muSTElaVIson} as a name. The name-maker can take his/her time and
> > analyze
> > what he/she has built. The listener, however, may well be hearing it
> > for the first time (and therefore cannot just pull it out as a known
> > glob). And, the speech stream gives very little time for the listener
> > to analyze new things; if she/he takes too long, the rest of the
> > sentence is gone
> I opine that even the baseline rule is too difficult to apply on
> the fly (though your practical experience as a speaker may prove
> me wrong -- are you speaking from experience or from principle), and
> the same goes for the self-segmentation in general. (Self-segmentation
> is good because it is crucial to unambiguity, but the particular
> algorithm is not sufficient to be of help to real-time comprehension.)
> Hence the benefit to the namer (or namee) weighs more, and maximizing
> the available space for the different morphological classes outweighs
> the negative impact of a slight increase in complexity of an already
> complicated algorithm.

I disagree: you have to consider the job of the listener in a global
perspective, that is from the parsing in words to the semantic
interpretation.
IMO Lojban syntax and in a far greater extend semantic are complicated
enough (or you may say just uncommon enough) that to add complexity
in the word parsing may make the language much more difficult to use
in real time, and in much greater proportion that the amount of added
complexity, should the uttered sentences become long or convoluted
enough. (like my last one I am sorry to say :-)
In other, I would like the word parsing to be trivial enough so that
I'll have more time to devote to the syntaxic and semantic
interpretation of is what being said.
Actually I do think we should strive to simplify the word parsing algorithm,
even if that means to restrain the available space of the morphology
classes. And this not really a problem, as it touches mainly cmene,
the restrictions on the format of cmavo and brivla being already strong
enough to be humanly parsable in real time.

If it were not for the commonly met resistance in any baseline
violation :-), I would even dare to suggest that we remove the multi-stress
syllables possibilities in cmene (a pity I can't change font size for that
part, I would have put it in 1pt :-). That will make the parsing *much*
more simple in a practical perspective, as then we could most of the time
very early spot a long cmene or an obvious missing pause.

-- Lionel