Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Some ideas/questions (long)

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 23:16:09 -0400

At 10:49 AM 5/7/03 +0800, [email-masked] wrote:
>[Robert LeChevalier:]
>
> > over to TLI. Prothero in particular invented the use of the "error" token
> > to define elidable terminators which is a key feature that TLI Loglan and
> > Lojban both share. Prothero expressly gave us permission in case it proved
>
>Apologies for hijacking this thread, but upon hearing about this use of the
>"error" token, I am starting to feel somewhat uncomfortable. Specifically, I
>fear that using such strange hacks will make it harder to explain (and
>grasp) intuitively when certain words can be elided, without referring to a
>specific 1970's parsing technology.

The specific parsing technology in this case is indeed fundamental to the 
design of the language.

>(I am thinking of utterances such as ".i le gerku jersi le mlatu fa'o"
>without "cu" before "jersi" -- this can be `intuitively' construed as a
>garden-path utterance for "The dog chases the cat", but will be rejected by
>an LALR(1) parser.)

It is not rejected by the Lojban parser, but doesn't have that meaning. It 
merely represents the grammatical list of two sumti: "The dog-chaser, the 
cat", which might be an answer to the question:

ma .e ma cu xebni le gerku

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org

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From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 23:16:09 -0400