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MatthewDeanMartin, On 01/05/2011 00:05:
--- In engelang@yahoogroups.com, And Rosta<and.rosta@...> wrote:MatthewDeanMartin, On 15/04/2011 21:27:Besides notepad and pencil& paper?In my case, none. But I can't even think of what I would wish for, other than notepad.If you're using notepad, then what is your compiler? If you say your brain, then I guess you're trying to say the meta language is English, and at best can be tidied up in LaTex or the like, to then be used primarily by meatware-- 2nd language acquisition, or as a mother tongue. All this makes the "engine" in "engineered languages" sound like it's misplaced?
I conceive of the invented language as an abstract object, but English (and diagrams and so forth) would provide the means for explaining it to others. I have a friend and colleague who researches algebras and uses only pencil and paper; only with the utmost reluctance, and only for email and suchlike, will he use a computer.
You mention parsers, but parsers written for natlangs don't truly parse, and even if you were to create something that could genuinely be parsed by a parser, you then be designing something constrained by the need to work with the parser.I'm not smart enough to understand what you mean when you say parsers don't really parse.
(My remarks might be somewhat out of date, because my acquaintance with parsers was 20 years ago, and NLP systems have progressed since then; but I'm not sure, because linguistics itself hasn't made much progress.) 'Parsing' without 'really parsing', involves assigning meaningless and potentially arbitrary structures to phonological strings. This is what the English parsers I knew back in the day did, and what Lojban parsers do. Whereas real processing of language involves taking phonological strings as input, and outputting a logical form -- i.e. decoding.
And Lojban isn't constrained by the state of the art when it's formal syntax was written down? The formal syntax that is somewhere on the lojban site is the same one used to write computer programming languages. I'm going to make a modest prediction that BNF style grammars will look as quaint and restrictive in a long time as COBOL looks today. But conlang grammars need to be written today and we have to use the tools available, unless we have the time& resources to personally write parsers or invent brand new metalanguages-- but those new metalanguages will probably be definable in BNF or the like as well, so were back to tools for coping with BNF& the like.
Any tool that helps with the rules defining the correspondences between form and meaning will help. And tools that don't do that mightn't help. Maybe with programming languages the isomorphism between form and meaning is so close that assigning structures to form very straightforwardly translates into the structures of meaning. But natlangs aren't like that, and engelangs that do that are too verbose. --And.