Elision, and {la nitcion.} eats humble pie

[cbmvax!uunet!mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU!nsn]

>Yes, you were being so snappy and irritable that you completely
>missed the point of my relatively pointless postscript: you
>overlooked the seventh sentence.  Go back and look at it again.

Heh heh. Subtle of you. The sentence was


which may be translated at {.i.i}, I suppose. Empty sentences are perfectly
grammatical.

>   ^   The elidable terminators make the language unambiguous, but may often be
>   ^                                              ^^ ????????
>   ^Did you mean "ambiguous"?
>   No he does not. Whatever do you mean, Guy?

To summarise: Guy thought the statement said terminators {poi} elidable,
whereas what was meant was terminators {noi} elidable. Ain't lojban cute ?%^)

>(Do you remember that Saturday Night Live sketch 

No, actually, we don't get it in Australia %^(

Stuff on YACC and context-sensitivity deleted. I hate to admit it but (hm)
Guy has a point. The BNF treatment is too handwaving. I don't know what
the full rigorous solution should be, and I consider it a pity that context-
sensitivity is such a spanner in the works for parsing, but I would not
change the BNF as it is for anything. I suppose a proper handling of terminators
should be worked out as some appendix to the grammar (maybe a preprocessor-
type job, though definitely not as code-dependent as in YACC). What I am
certain of is that the elisions are necessary in lojban, and I don't want
to see them go, and surely the right terminals can be inserted before the
right lexemes (if C code can do it, so can an abstract algorithm), and is
anybody gonna have a go at this? {doi lojbab. do'u} [note the terminator
just then %^)]: do you have any documentation on this? Perhaps this should
be covered before baselining?

>I am proposing that it is better for some purposes, if feasible, to produce a
>more complex grammar for lojban that would eliminate the need for
>context-sensitive side-conditions that dictate when elision is permissible.

Maybe, but I'd treat that as a last resort. An illegible grammar (like the
YACC of yore) is not much use paedagogically (as you point out), and if
people can't use it, who cares about the computers.

>(Imagine a variant of lojban in which you could
>declare "little words" on the fly!)
>	typedef at John;
>	I gave John the office.     /* This means "I gave at the office." */

I'd rather not, actually, but I have this hunch this may in fact be possible.
Oh well. Never mind me - I'm an esperantist, I don't know any better.

Got a hold of the Loglan article in Scientific American, June 1960. Nothing
like lojban, lemme tell ya.

Bye all. co'omi'e nitcion.