Re: JimC on Colin on JimC on Frank's easy text

[Colin Fine <C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK>]

Jim replies to my response to his comments on Frank:
> > I interpreted it as "le mlatu poi cmalu". What's the problem?
>
>The problem is, you're too human.  Imagine Nick's Prolog project; how can
>it decide what interpretation to use?  To us, it's obvious that this tanru
>is supposed to be restrictive.

This problem will always be with us at some level, if the language is going
to be able to refer to those messy, imprecise things and concepts which make
up our world. Your dikyjvo moves the uncertainty out a distance, but it's
still there. I have no objection to your following it - and indeed I might quite
often myself - but I do not want it legislated on.

>  I'm not going to get into a flame war
>(particularly with people who LIKE the German style), because it's a
>matter of taste, but I wanted to explain that my comment was based on
>a universal principle, rather than on a non-existent Lojban style guide.

After I read this a couple of times, I realised what you were meaning by
'universal'  - viz that you hold to a general principle underlying your
taste. And of course it is a well-known principle: I think Chomsky
described a transformation called 'Heavy Clause Shift' or something
like that.
 I have no objection to your holding such a view, and as I said my
own taste agrees. I do object to your stating it as a matter of fact.
You perhaps assumed that making it a matter of style implied that
this was a personal view; but this might not be obvious to people
who are not experienced in Lojban, and who see it among a list
of corrections to grammar and vocabulary.


Re observatives: I wrote an essay about VSO a few months ago,
pointing out that Lojban could be changed to VSO with no
syntactic change, and by altering (not adding or removing)
one rule of interpretation.
[viz:
At present: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1
unless it follows the selbri, when it is numbered 2. This applies
in all contexts.
New rule: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1
except inside selgadri, where it is numbered 2.]
 The semantics of observatives are not very clear, and as
I said before many writers are frequently omitting x1 to generate
what are technically (syntactically) observatives, and
semantically sentences with elided x1's.
Particularly common are:
1) elided x1's in narrative:
 le ctuca cu cadzu .i viska le tixru .i terpa tu'ari
2) elided x2's together with conversion or explicit marking
to get a heavy clause afterwards:
cumki falenu mi clira seixruti
(or) se cumki lenu mi clira seixruti