Re: [stack] Lojban (was: cabbages and kings)

chris glur scripsit:

> I'd love to know what he tells, but working from
> 3rd-world [S.A becoming 4th-world] I can't d/l
> 6M2 pdfs !

Sure.  The PDF is a scanned image of the original paper article, which
is why it is so big.

Here's the argument in a nutshell.  In English we can have sentences
like "Frank said that John saw Mary help Peter make the children swim",
which parses as "Frank said (that John saw (Mary help (Peter make (the
children swim))))."  Because all the embedding is on the right, this
can be processed iteratively, and anglophones have no trouble with it.

The other Germanic languages, however, like their verbs at the end
in subordinate clauses.  In German the expected equivalent would be
recursive: "Frank said (that John (that Mary (that Peter (that the
children swim) make) help) saw)", but this is too complex for unaided
human minds to parse: the stack overflows silently, and when we get to
"swim make help saw" we cannot retrieve the supposedly stacked contexts
any more.  So the sentence must be broken up and re-expressed using
simpler pieces.

Dutch and Swiss German, however, can use what is called a cross-serial
dependency in cases like this: the verbs appear in the same order
as the objects rather than in the opposite order, thus:  "Frank said
(that John_1 Mary_2 Peter_3 the children_4 saw_1 help_2 make_3 swim_4)."
Apparently, this is *not* beyond human ability to comprehend, and such
sentences can get arbitrarily large.

Now in the Dutch case, it is possible to construct a context-free parse
that will handle this sentence, even though it associates the wrong
verbs and objects, namely "Frank said (that John (Mary (Peter (the
children saw) help) make) swim)."  Even though this parse is nonsense
(corresponding to English "Frank said that John swam Mary make Peter
help the children see"), it *is* a parse.  So Dutch can be parsed by a
context-free parser provided you don't care about its semantics.

Swiss German, however, cannot.  The reason is that Swiss German verbs are
divisible into two classes, those which take accusative objects and those
which take dative objects, and the distinction is marked on the nouns.
Thus in Swiss German we must say "Frank said that John-ACC Mary-ACC
Peter-DAT the children-ACC saw help make swim", and the Dutch trick will
not get the right case endings on the right nouns, or even guarantee
that there is the right *number* of accusative- and dative-marked nouns
to correspond with the verbs.

So Swiss German is mildly context-sensitive, and therefore so is natural
language.

> Wirth [the Pascal, Modula, Oberon] hi-priest, a native Swiss-german,
> has a remarkable english-text writing style which I've been trying
> [unsuccessfuly] to analyse.

When asked by an anglophone how to pronounce his name, he replied
"You may call me by value, and call me Worth, or you may call me
by name, and call me Veert."

> Is Lojban a minalal syntax, canonical, framework ?

I hardly know whether to answer yes or no.  It's a natural language
(except that it is artificially constructed rather than naturally
evolved), complete with a general-purpose phonology, syntax, lexicon, etc.
But it has the special property that it is syntactically unambiguous.
All sentences have only one possible parse.

> I speculate that such a system would allow english, russian, japanese
> collaborators to communicate -- in writing, so fluency becaomes
> irrelevant.

Indeed.

-- 
John Cowan  [email protected]    http://ccil.org/~cowan
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.  --John Donne