From jay.kominek@colorado.edu Tue Aug 14 19:34:49 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 15 Aug 2001 02:34:49 -0000 Received: (qmail 97046 invoked from network); 15 Aug 2001 02:34:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 15 Aug 2001 02:34:44 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO ucsub.colorado.edu) (128.138.129.12) by mta1 with SMTP; 15 Aug 2001 02:34:44 -0000 Received: from ucsub.colorado.edu (kominek@ucsub.colorado.edu [128.138.129.12]) by ucsub.colorado.edu (8.11.2/8.11.2/ITS-5.0/student) with ESMTP id f7F2YiW00724 for ; Tue, 14 Aug 2001 20:34:44 -0600 (MDT) Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 20:34:44 -0600 (MDT) To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE From: Jay Kominek On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, And Rosta wrote: > > > * the syntactic structure assigned by the yacc grammar > > > * terminators > > > > Many natural languages can be approximated by unambiguous context-free > > grammars. Even more languages can be handled by ambiguous ones. So a > > LALR(1) grammar doesn't seem strange, just unlikely to occur naturally. > > I'm not sure how your remarks pertain to mine, but at any rate, what > I meant is: Yacc uses LALR(1) grammars. So, where I said LALR(1), you can pretend I said Yacc. (Or just realize Yacc is a piece of software which generates parsers based on LALR(1) grammars, and what we're really interested is the grammar, and not the parser generator) > * In natlang syntax, all phrases have lexical heads; so a natlang > grammar of Lojban would make every phrase an X Phrase, where X is > a selmaho. Huh? > * Natlang syntax doesn't have terminators (AFAIK) They'd probably be significantly less ambiguous if they did. > > > * MEX > > > > I wouldn't be surprised if something similar evolved in languages if > > talking about math were a significantly more important part of the live= s > > of all speakers. > > Right. But that's not how things are in actuality. Well, my point was that you can't say whether or not it is really unnatural or disallowed universally, as it isn't a feature natural languages have needed to evolve (yet). (I'm feeling some sort of weird deja vu at this point... I could swear this has come up before.) > > > * semantically arbitrary place structures > > > > They don't seem to be arbitrary to me (at least not the order). Seems a= s > > though they're all the most frequently used things which might be relat= ed > > to each other. > > What I mean is that you can't generalize about the semantics of, say, > x2s across predicates, and, in principle, you can't predict which > semantic argument is mapped to x1 and which to x2. Er. How is _that_ relevent to natural languages? They don't have clearly delimited places, and you certainly can't generalize about the information related to or provided by the verb florgendorf which I just created, let alone go, eat, shower, etc. > > > * SE > > > > Sort of unfair to list it as its own thing, as its merely a side effect= of > > the place structure. > > The selmaho SE, both because it swaps x1 and x2/3/4/5/... and because it'= s > recursive. I'm aware of selma'o SE. And whats recursive about SE cmavo? (I'm familiar with recursion in all of its forms as a programming technique, and none of them are even remotely relevent.) > > > * SI/SA/SU > > > > Hey. Natural languages have ways to indicate that you just made a mista= ke. > > They're not as explicit in the amount of mistake you made, but they're > > there. > > But, as you say, they're less explicit. Because speakers can't remember > which words they've just said. I strongly suspect that if you identified the techniques used, and compared where the speaker went back to, you'd find a correlation. In fact, I know there is evidence that people tend to return to phrase boundries. I'd even dig up a reference, except I sold back that textbook. > I don't think it will, but it would become a different language if > it became a natlang. I suppose that if unnatural features survived > unchanged into a lojban creole, then there would be some very > significant conclusions to be drawn. Well, we'll see what happens when some Lojbanists has kids. :) Bets, anyone? :) - Jay Kominek Plus =C3=A7a change, plus c'est la m=C3=AAme chose