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Rob: > On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 05:08:50PM +0100, And Rosta wrote: > > Note that natlangs simply do not have terminators. For Ceqli, with > > its aspirations to have a more natural feel than Loglan, terminators > > are out of the question, except as a brute-force emergency device > > (for things like quotations). > > You seem to have a much different idea of Ceqli's purpose than I do. > > I think that Ceqli should become a version of Lojban with a much better > morphology and with certain annoyances fixed. Various things in it have > mimiced natural languages up until now; the ones that don't work in a > logical language will have to go. I have the impression that Rex and his fellow collaborators want something like a blend of English and Chinese, while preserving the virtues of Lojban. What exactly does that mean? Well, for one thing Lojban has a lot of obscure complexity that can be dispensed with. For another, the goal of brevity and terseness is added to the mix -- the telegraphese "Man bites dog" idiom; this goal was never one of Loglan's. > Though terminators are unnatural, I think the alternative is worse. > Requiring every place of every predicate would cancel out the > conciseness that Ceqli has. The other alternative, of course, is for the > grammar to be ambiguous, in which case I don't think Ceqli would fill > any particular need. This is not the only alternative. A better alternative is to have a clause-initial particle that tells you which arguments are present and which order they occur in. This has all sorts of added side benefits. For one thing, it automatically distinguishes between 'nouns', 'verbs' and 'clauses': every clause begins with one of these particles, and within the clause -- "man bite dog", say -- you know that the 2nd element is the verb because the clause-initial particle tells you so. Also, don't underestimate the unnaturalness of terminators. If something simply doesn't occur in natural language, it is very likely going to be a very problematic feature except for people with computer-programmer-like minds. > Incidentally, how is an "initial particle telling which places are > dropped" any better than a terminator? It's better because it's more natural, and because it's a feature added on to the language to allow for extra terseness, rather than being built into the underlying design. There are also the further advantages that I mention above. Erroneously omitted terminators are a frequent problem in Lojban text. --And.