Re: TECH: grammar updates

[John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>]

la nitcion. poi me la prolog. lojbo cu cusku di'e

> [Dropping "*mo'u"] leaves us with little need for {mau} at all.
> I hope you all are aware of this... (debate welcomed, but i'll have little
> time to participate in it...

Good point.  I could live without "mau" and "me'a", and then we'd have two
free CVV monosyllables!

>  though I *have* successfully implemented
> tanru-unit-2 -> SE ... BRIVLA, and I allow cmene and brivla to be passed
> onto Prolog from yacc directly, without needing to be predefined within
> Prolog.)

Hurrah, hurrah!

> I don't remember well the discussions in October in which xo'e was invented
> by Lojbab, but I do know that Lojbab regarded it with much suspicion, and
> while I've used it in my lujvo paper to explain the selpinxe <> se pinxe
> debate, I did not agree with Lojbab in considering its paedagogical use
> reason enough to assign it a real cmavo. But so be it.

See my remarks to Colin.  If your argument about the Deep Gismu Hypothesis
is sound, then "ne'e" must exist.

> In fact, congrats to John for consistently dealing with grammatical issues
> so elegantly.

ki'e

> One question though: your use of ZEI has:
>
> tanru_unit_2 -> anyword (ZEI anyword) ...
>
> I would have though something like
>
> tanru_unit_2 -> anyword [(ZEI anyword) ...] ZEI tanru_unit_2
>
> to be more sensible:

That would lead to a mixing of levels.  "zei" compounding is done in the
preparser, which doesn't understand nonterminals like "tanru-unit-2";
"xy. zei se broda" != "xy. zei selbroda" (oddly, both are grammatical;
the first is a tanru with [bogus] seltanru "xy. zei se").

OTOH, I could restrict the final term of a "zei" compound to be a brivla,
which I suppose is what you really want.

> I find it hard to think of a place structure for
> {xy zei zy}.

So do I.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.