Re: TECH: grammar updates

[Nick Nicholas <nsn@MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU>]

The Seraphim surely rejoiced when John Cowan spoke thus:
{.i lai seraFIM. cu ja'o salgei ja'ejoica lenu la djan. kau,n. cusku lesedu'u
go'e}
}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!

Ouch! This one's too drastic, I fear. They're too entrenched in the language.
Whjat we can do is make a stylistic recommendation, whereby we point out that
a {zmadu} selbri says what we actually usually intend to say by {mau}.

}>  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 meant, of course, not just parse the beast, but switch the sumti around
accordingly. Since the parser will not know all the sumti at the point of
parsing tanru_unit_2 (it's yet to parse those following), I had to do some
hairy forcing calls to be delayed in the sumti-juggling clauses; cost me
a day. But it's done! It just might not run on *your* Prolog compiler! (I'm
using 'when' clauses).

}> 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.

Hm. Given I'd want people to be able to say things like {xy zei go'i}, I
suppose that's not warranted: best to let the grammar overproduce than
underproduce...

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

I'm sure someone will work something out :)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nick S. Nicholas,                      "Rode like foam on the river of pity
Depts. of CompSci & ElecEng,            Turned its tide to strength
University of Melbourne, Australia.     Healed the hole that ripped in living"
nsn@{munagin.ee|mundil.cs}.mu.oz.au           - Suzanne Vega, Book Of Dreams
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