Subject: [lojban] Re: cmegadri valfendi preti

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 11:55:26 +0100

And Rosta:
> I'm not sure that you understood the point I was making. I was claiming
> that the morphological rules are ALREADY too complex to be used in
> real time. It is therefore irrelevant that making the rules even more
> complex will make life even harder for the listener struggling to parse
> in real time.

Ok, I indeed misunderstood you, but I still disagree: I don't think the
algorithm is that complex, and taking account the required breathing
rightly emphasized by Robin, my guess is that one could parse in real
time most common utterances even with non clue at all on the meaning.
I agree with lojbab that only some fu'ivla could pose problems.

> As you know, some natural languages do have phonological clues to
> word-boundaries, but on the whole disambiguation is accomplished
> pragmatically. So in practise, for actual comprehension, the
> segmentation algorithm is not important.

Of course I agree that most of the time for a language I am fluent enough
in, the pragmatic context is enough, because as you said, I know more
or less what is likely to be said. But this could highly depend on the
structural intrinsic possibilities of the language and on the specific
context of the communication instance:
- some languages, like mongolian, have a very high tendency to create at
will new words, which may have a life restricted to the current
uttterance, but which nonetheless are pretty much rightly understood by
the audience (think of real-time created lujvo!). Around 30% of the words
used by poets are not to be found in dictionaries. And, yes, not
surprisingly, mongolian does have strong phonological restrictions
on words that help the parsing. Very lojbanic in a sense :-)
- in some contexts, like when declaiming poetry, your pragmatic guess is
of non help. Think of latin poetry, which was mainly a poetry to be said
(maybe I should say to be sung): one of the appreciated device of the
poets was to lure you in false parsing for a while and then to suddenly
enlight you with a strinking sound-syntaxic-semantic combination.
I experienced myself some of this, while being a student, in a latin
course when we tried to revive this tradition. (of course, a native Latin
would have certainly laughed at some of our childish misunderstanding,
but would have still valued some others).

-- Lionel