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

On Feb 26, 2009, at 11:01 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> 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.

Very interesting. The analogy to stack-based languages is certainly  
very clear (if unfortunate).

- John