[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > Someone someday is going the face up to the fact that de facto
> > grammar of {kau} is that it can follow any question word, but
> > not meaningfully anything else, and write a grammar accordingly,
> > using whatever formalism best gets the job done.
>
> Well, "someone someday" turned out to be "me today"
>
> Despite Lojbab's strictures, I decided to confine the new selma'o
> KAU to appear after only those selma'o that actually have question
> words in them: viz. CUhE FA GA JA GIhA GUhA A UI KOhA GOhA CAI PA
> In a nutshell, it works fine. I have attached the necessary context
> diff against grammar.300. In each case, KAU is bound tightly to the
> preceding cmavo: you can't say "sejinaikau" or even "sejikaunai", it
> has to be "jikau". You can, however, say "xokauroi" and "xokaumoi"
> And of course it's grammatical to use "kau" after a non-question cmavo
> that belongs to one of the above selma'o
Where most other people here are minded as programmers, the linguist
in me balks slightly. I would cross-classify the cmavo, so that
{xo}, say, is both a PA and a 'MA' (= WH-word), and the distribution
of KAU is defined in terms of MA. That captures the facts much better,
in ways that I will spell out of they're not obvious to everyone.
Very probably this solution violates some guiding principle or other
of the parser or the formal grammar, but as a linguist my inclincation
is to do justice to the language first, and then try to find the best
formalism second.
> This is a probe of jboskeists: do you think it's worth writing up a
> proposal for the byfy, or should we just leave bad enough alone? I am
> a little paranoid about possible trouble because KAU is used in both the
> main grammar and the preparser grammar, which has been known to lead to
> trouble in the past
My opinion: Leave bad enough alone everywhere, until there is a critical
mass of people who are dissatisfied with leaving bad enough alone anywhere.
Piecemeal improvements will just generate aggro, without substantially
moving Lojban towards being a better language. As everybody knows, my
name is permanently down on the list of people wanting to form part
of that critical mass.
--And.