Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban

From: Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 20:34:44 -0600 (MDT)

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 lives
> > 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 as
> > though they're all the most frequently used things which might be related
> > 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 effectof
> > 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 mistake.
> > 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 <[email-masked]>
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose