Re: [engelang] Xorban: Termsets - engelang messages

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 6:22 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

On Oct 4, 2012 5:21 PM, "Mike S." <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 11:38 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
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>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Some initial comments.
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>> 1. I don't see a good rationale for having a load of special rules to accommodate parentheticals -- at least not when Xorban is trying not to be more complicated than it needs to be.
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> Do you prefer that parentheticals be removed from the grammar, or handled another way?

It depends what we require of them and how simply that can be accommodated. For the time being, I'd suggest leaving them out. That doesn't preclude restoring them later.

No one has really been using them, but that's to be expected given that we are all novice users at this point. Intuitively, I suspect that parentheticals will find great use among fluent speakers, e.g. as a way of adding interjectives, vocatives, topic switching, nonrestrictive clauses and similar things. All of these things would be useful right now if we were to move past the toy-sentence stage.

>> 2. It would be good to adopt a sounder less improvised formalism, separating syntax from phonology, and able to accommodate phonologically-null and semantically-interpreted syntax. What we have at present is a constituent structure imposed on a phonological string -- everything wrong with Lojban pseudogrammar is wrong with this, albeit to a far lesser degree.
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> I am not sure how separating phonology (which is really just the segment-terminals in these rules) from syntax would help anything,

It would remove cruft and avoid the delusion that syntactic terminal nodes consist of phonological material. If there happened to be perfect homomorphism between syntax and phonology, the annoyance would be purely conceptual, but given the goal of usability and brevity, there will not be this homomorphism; & we already are in agreement about this.

You may have to jar my memory -- can you give an illustration involving a hypothetical design in which it would be desirable for that homomorphism not to hold?

> but I would like to point out that unlike Lojban's production rules, Xorban's are 100% vanilla BNF, and have been from Jorge's first draft onwards. My hypothetical rules are also vanilla BNF.

That's hardly a recommendation, tho. There's no virtue in vanilla BNF.

(For the record, I should have said "a vanilla notational variant of Extended Backus-Naur Form", technically speaking, but hopefully the point holds.)

>> 3. It would be helpful for the rules for binding to be made explicit. Do the rules for binding remain the same as they are for basic Xorban?
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>> --And.
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> To date there have been no binding rules in the formal grammar.

To date there has been no codified formal grammar. There exists an ad hoc sketch by Jorge of some bits of grammar.

What I am going to write here and for the rest of this email is not going to be fully responsive to your points, but rather will be expositional of my own (and possibly others' to some degree) loglang design perspective.

The design of a loglang is conceived as the design of two separate but parallel formal modules: grammar (production rules) and semantics (interpretation rules). The grammatical module subsumes syntax, morphology and the phoneme inventory, and the semantic module provides an interpretation for each grammatical production in parallel. Regarded purely grammatically, a _formal language_ over some formal alphabet (i.e. the phonemes) is simply some subset of the set of all possible finite strings composed of those phonemes. A _formal grammar_ of a language is simply a set of rules that defines which strings (i.e. the sentences) are in that subset (i.e. the language). There is nothing more to a "formal grammar" than that.

This is a more technical overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar

Jorge's grammars have been complete formal grammars under this definition. In addition, most of the semantic module is implicitly specified by default because the language is closely isomorphic with FOPL, the semantic interpretation of which is largely understood. What I see most of the rest of the project entailing is finding rigorous and efficient (nonhandwaving) ways of incorporating various features of natural language into the FOPL framework that we have so far. That is not entirely trivial of course.

But we can't intelligently use that as the basis for serious discussion. Jorge's sketch is innocuous because the rules of syntax are so simple that one grocks them quite independently of the BNF stuff. But for more complicated proposals it simply won't do. As formulated, these termset rules merely impose pointless patterns on phonological strings, & it's somewhat shameful that we are so blithely recapitulating the inanities of Lojban. If the syntactic rules don't generate logical formulas then throw them away; they're junk.

If the grammar for formulas without termsets (i.e. trees) generate logical formulas, then assuming no mistakes have been made I assure you that the proposed grammar for formulas with termtrees also generate logical formulas, because every formula that contains termtrees can be interpreted unambiguously as a rewriting of a certain formula that does not contain termtrees. The language with termtrees is a superset of the language without them, but under the accompanying proposed semantics, the language with termtrees has precisely zero greater expressive power than the language without them. It has merely greater abbreviatory power.

There was a fair deal of work over two weeks coming up with a design that is grammatically unambiguous. Given the skills that I have, I would not have been able to contribute towards a meaningful result without relying on the formalism of BNF or something similar.

The termset proposals themselves seem to me to be essentially a good idea - a useful abbreviatory device. I mean not to criticize the attempt to find workable abbreviatory devices, but only to criticize the idea that these BNF rules have merit. The ideas that the BNF rules are a misguided attempt to formalize surely do have merit, tho until I understand them I can't comment on their adequacy.

,, And.