Re: sumti grammar oddity

At 01:56 PM 9/11/03 -0700, Jorge "Llambías" wrote:

>I just noticed an oddity in the grammar of sumti. The EBNF rule for
>sumti-tail (what comes after a gadri) is:
>
> sumti-tail-1 = [quantifier] selbri [relative-clauses]
> | quantifier sumti
>
>I expected it to be:
>
> sumti-tail-1 = [quantifier] selbri [relative-clauses]
> | quantifier sumti-6
>
>where sumti-6 is an unquantified, not connected sumti. A sumti is more
>general than sumti-6, it can be quantified and connected with other
>sumti-6.
>
>So the grammar allows things like:
>
>lo ci (ko'a .e ko'e)
>lo ciboi re broda
>
>I could make some sense of {lo ciboi re broda} interpreting it
>as {lo ci lo re broda},

I won't guess what you interpret the latter to be. The former under the 
version of the language I know would mean "at least some of the 3 pairs of 
broda in the universe", which I would loosely equate to "lo ciboi re lo 
[xa] broda, since there would have to be exactly 6 for there to be 3 pairs 
of broda in the universe.

The former is difficult because the prosumti are undefined. It might 
expand out into logically connected sumti, in which case ko'a might mean re 
broda and ko'e might mean re brode, and you have two claims parallel to the 
one you can grasp. But a corresponding *intended* usage might be "lo 
so'eboi pa tarci joi so'u plini" (the many planetary systems).

> but what is {lo ci (ko'a e ko'e)}?

(The real answer is that we tried to make the grammar as unrestricted as 
possible, while still being able to resolve the structure unambigously per 
YACC.

There is all kinds of nonsense possible in number strings too, so we should 
expect some amount of nonsense to be grammatical in Lojban sumti structures.

At one time I was one of those fighting to find interpretations for as many 
possible strings, but Cowan convinced me that this was a waste of time.)

-- 
lojbab [email protected]
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org