Re: quest for opinion

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!bradford.ac.uk!C.J.Fine>]

>
>
>   I have some opinions, but in the interest of saving bandwidth,
> it seemed wiser to first ask if these subjects have been gone over
> while I've been off the list (about a year).  If someone's archived
> any discussion, or can paraphrase such, I'd like to get a copy.
>   If not, I'll be glad to try to explain my opinions in greater detail.
>
> 1) Place structures.  More specifically, is it appropriate that one
>    gismu cover more than one relation because of place structures?

There was a long discussion last November. Bob's position was

different relations iff different place structures iff different brivla

I'm not sure how it all ended up - at one point there was discussion of
a place-suppressor, ie a cmavo which said "This place is not just empty,
but is actually absent from the bridi-relation I am expressing (which is
thus a different relation from the one this brivla normally expresses)",
but I don't know whether this was actually rejected or just got fed up
waiting and went away.

>
> 2) Emphasis and idiom:  There are several sets of words in the gismu
>    lists I have that seem to me to express the same relation(s).  They
>    appear to me to differ only by a matter of emphasis and/or idiom.
>    Shouldn't there be just one gismu?

It is no longer the case that gismu are (semantically) primitive - that
was one of the paths by which a concept was admitted into gismu space,
but there are others - particularly, primitiveness in human terms, and
productiveness in tanru and lujvo. Thus there may be words that are
logically unnecessary - though none, I think that are strictly
synonymous once you take their place structures into account.

>
> 3) Translation vs transliteration:  Has anyone yet managed to produce
>    a concept in lojban that is honestly very difficult or impossible
>    to express in English, yet is understandable by people in a non-
>    idomatic way?  Here is essential that I emphasise *concept*, not
>    sentence or somesuch.  (Just because it'll probably come up, I'll
>    try to handle the JL16 example at the bottom of the letter).

Don't know

>
> 4) I haven't had time to really work over the BNF, but I'm wondering
>    if it's true that you cannot distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical
>    lojban without knowing the rafsi used?

It depends slightly what you mean by grammatical. All you need to
*parse* a text is to be able to recognise brivla - you don't need to
know anything more about them.
However a sentence with a sumti in a place which the selbri lacks, is in
a sense not grammatical - though I think most people prefer to treat it
as grammatical but nonsensical, like a sentence with two inconsistent
values in the same sumti-place (which is perfectly possible with
explicit FA tags, and the parser will accept it as valid).
Note the the rafsi are nothing to do with it - the place-structure of a
lujvo cannot be algorithmically determined from the component brivla or
their rafsi (even if some form of dikyjvo were adopted, this would still
be true).
>
> That's that.  I thank y'all for your time and help.
>
> cheers,
> arthur
>
>
mi danfu tu'a la artr
>
> ---
>
> Now the JL16 example I was talking about:
>
> On the bottom of p16 of JL16, there's an example of a set of
> circumstances that could be transliterated as
>   "X kept on: kept on hitting the dog too long, too long."
>
> I think I'd be more likely to render the English as:
>   "X punished the dog until it died."
>
> Or iff you want greater specificity:
>   "X punished the dog so often that it died."   --or--
>   "X punished the dog by hitting it on so many occasions that it died."
>
> I think that the concept can be clearly and succinctly expressed in
> English when translated, but not transliterated.
>
In context, these may be perfectly good translations, but note that you
have introduced a concept (punish vs hit) and dropped one (punish vs
hit-too-often). I think the original translation given is not a good
example of something which cannot be clearly expressed in English: it
has a sort of pragmatic unacceptability, but is perfectly understandable
once explained. I would be much more interested in a text that cannot be
expressed in English without a substantial paraphrase..

	co'omi'e kolin