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Fifafuban [LONG]
Xorxes:
> mi na troci le nu bandu la fifafuban i ku'i mi tcidu zmanei ro selsku
> be bau fy ro clani je fapro be fy selsku be bau la gliban
i rinka fa pa poo jufra lei ti clani fapro glibau selsku
i kui.............
Lojbab:
> >> Rearranging sumti seemingly at random has NO apparent expressive
> >> purpose, and that is precisely why it is stylistically dead.
> >They're not rearranged. They're merely arranged. The sumti must be in
> >some order. That they are usually given in 1-2-3-4-5 order is mere
> >habit, mere laziness, or mere caution.
> >> >Your questions imply that fi-fa-fu is analogous to OSV in English and to
> >> >passive. It isn't.
> >> I agree - the English usages have stylistic meaning. fi-fa-fu does not.
> >> There is neither recognized convention nor implicit Gricean or other
> >> linguistic basis to give reader any idea what you intended by the
> >> placement of each sumti.
> >Right. And this absence of convention means the writer can proceed with
> >impunity. I did only what was permitted by the grammar, and nothing I
> >did clashed with any rules of information structure.
> The convention of course is 1-2-3-4-5 order. This is the normal
> understanding of a sequential numbering.
> Writing in a different order is permitted (no language police will stop
> you so "impunity" applies), but those who bother to read will have some
> amount of question as to why the nonstandard order was used. As you
> seem to agree, there is no convention for interpreting fi-fa-fu - so
> what have you communicated by doing so: only perhaps that you are an
> iconoclast who likes to violate conventions for no obvious reason.
The motive, let us say, is "avoidance of banality" - a valid rhetorical
notion. A message delivered in less banal form can be a more fulfilling
read.
Certainly you seem to wish to bleed lojban of stylistic vitality, and
resitance to your attitudes is reason enough to use fifafuban.
If fi-fa-fu really did add cognitive complexity, then I might be more
willing to accept your point, but I am not persuaded it does. True,
fi-fa-fu requires additional words, but fa-lessness requires counting
to keep track of whereabouts in the 1-2-3-4-5 sequence one is. Overall,
language clearly prefers the former method of identifying arguments
(in fact I don't know of any natural language with clause structure like
fa-less Lojban).
> I do not believe that anyone is yet skilled enough as a reader or writer
> of lojban that their stylistic experiments will always be valid usages.
> We are thus for now limited to "baby talk" or something only one notch
> above it, until we have people sufficiently skilled at the given level
> that increasing the stylistic complexity can rely on most of the
> stylistics being understood so that that which is new can then be
> identified and examined.
Maybe you overestimate the importance of stylistics. Apart from obvious
stuff like sequencing of presentation of information, there's not much
that can be said that would amount to "a grammar of stylistics". Or,
if you think otherwise, point me to such a "stylistics grammar" for
English, the most intensively studied language there is.
> >> The result of your usage included a string of 16 consecutive cmavo. I
> >> dare say it would not be easy to write an understandable English
> >> sentence that used 16 consecutive English function words (i.e. words
> >> that are not nouns/verbs/adjectives/adverbs). Lojban WILL have more
> >> cmavo than English, but I think it still requires SOME content to be
> >> understandable.
> > Could you, but not each of us, ever, with so very much of this and so
> > very little of that, so much down here or so little up there, ....
> >- embed that in some suitable context and there's not an iota of difficulty.
> On the contrary, I had to read that twice in order to figure out what
> the structure was, and even with that I cannot think of any example
> where I could use this construct fluently (i.e. without pauses to let my
> listeners figure out what I am saying), and have it be understood.
> Indeed, grasping the whole, I can get a general idea what you are trying
> for, but I cannot come up with a context that fits those words and is
> understandable. Moreover, I am sure that if I could come up with such a
> context, I am quite sure that I could never figure out why you chose
> that complex phrasing rather than something simpler to understand.
Did you think of trying yourself to come up with such a 16 word sequence?
Try "Will he or she, or indeed any of us at all, be either here or there?"
If you can't figure this out, then we cannot consider you competent to
comment on the matters under discussion.
> >> Adding one word is quite understandable and acceptable. Adding words
> >> and changing order is less so
> >> "Down inside the back which was a part of the seat some coins were by
> >> me found."
> >> would probably be considered stylistically unacceptable English.
> >I see no problem with that. The preposing of "by me" probably adds
> >extra syntactic complexity, and for this or other reasons is marked, but
> >it's still okay.
> I dare say that I will never see a newspaper, a publisher, or an English
> professor accept that sentence. Indeed I cannot think of any context
> when such a sentence would be appropriate, unless one invokes undefined
> poetic aesthetics. The average person will say "I found some coins down
> inside the back part of the seat.", and would view someone using the
> above as simply perverse.
The ability to accurately judge acceptability and to find appropriate
contexts is both an innate talent and a skill acquired with practice.
If you lack this ability, then the onus is on me (as it is when teaching)
to provide the appropriate context, or to find equivalent examples that
you can see can be acceptable. But I can't really be bothered. Still,
here is such an alternative example with the same allegedly unacceptable
ordering: "Down inside the crack which had opened up in the earth a
treasure trove was, by Ericson, found and claimed for the state of
Ruritania".
> >> "There was this man that she had about him to us been telling that I met."
> >Do you think that "She had been telling about him to us that I met this
> >man" is normal? I don't understand your example.
> The unmarked version is "I met the man that she had been telling us
> about."
I don't see in what sense this is an unmarked version of the former
sentence. The former is simply ungrammatical; it's not a marked version.
> English has no topical prenexes, unlike Lojban. I would accept
> in Lojban: The man that she had been telling us about zo'u I met him,
> and I think that the Lojban place structure would actually lead to the
> long-winded English that I used above, given an SOV native speaker.
> le nanmu poi le fetsi tu'a ke'a mi'a skicu zo'u mi penmi ny
> would translate literally to the above English (I think).
It's normal practise in even literal translation to make the translation
grammatical. I cannot see what points you are trying to make by
"translating" into ungrammatical English, or by making the obvious claim
that ungrammatical sentences can be difficult to understand.
> >> Your usages seem to me as strainedly abnormal as these.
> >I reject the basis on which you form your impressions. In English there
> >exist conventions of style and usage. Not in Lojban.
> There is one - the onus on the speaker is to make clear what it is that
> s/he is trying to communicate.
There is a difference between general, universal principles of
communication, and language-specific conventions of style and usage.
No description of a language need bother say "The speaker must make
clear what they're trying to communicate", but descriptions do need
to say "this locution is informal, and potentially impolite", etc.
> >Further, in most cases in english the syntactically more marked
> >construction is also syntactically more complex. This is not so in
> >Lojban.
> Well I just showed that there was some English which was so complex that
> you couldn't understand it, which was quite straightforward in Lojban.
What you showed is that there was some non-English which, being non-
English, seemed to me to be irrelevant to any point I could conceive
of you wishing to make.
> But in any event you original sentence that started this thread WAS
> syntactically more complex than the less marked form.
> > > > [fi la pou lojbab ralju]
> > > > [fe lei jai fau skicu
> > > > [be fo lo jbovla]
> > > > [bei fe maa]
> > > > [bei fai ro da poi kea me maa]
> > > > [bei fi da]]
> > > > [fa diu]
> > > >tinbe
> Start with the fact that "fa di'u" is syntactically more complex than
> "di'u" alone. It invokes an additional rule of the grammar.
The addition of extra words in itself is a trivial kind of complexity
that does not necessarily increase processing difficulty.
But, to get back to the point, it is not clear that "Fa diu" is
syntactically more complex that "diu" alone. We can't count grammar rules
because the written grammar is incomplete and formalized in an ad hoc
way (and there's no *obvious* way of doing it better). The function
of "fa diu" can just be "Sumti", but the function of "diu" alone must
be "nth sumti".
> After correcting one grammatical error, the following is the parse:
> fi la po'u la lojbab ralju fe lei jai fau skicu be fo lo jbovla bei fe
> ma'a bei fai ro da poi ke'a me ma'a bei fi da fa di'u tinbe
> ({<[fi (la {<po'u [la lojbab] GE'U> ralju} KU)] [fe (lei {<jai fau skicu>
> 1234 5 67 8 4 5 67
> <be [fo (lo jbovla KU)] [bei (fe ma'a) (bei {fai <[(ro BOI) da] [poi (ke'a
> 8 9 8 9 0 123 3
> {<me ma'a ME'U> VAU}) KU'O]>} {bei <fi da>})] BE'O>} KU)]> <fa di'u>} {
> 45 5 43 2 1098 76 54 3
> tinbe VAU})
> 21
> I could have miscounted, but I think that "me ma'a ME'U" is inside 15
> nested sets of parens. Now here is an alternate phrasing of the same
> information:
> di'u cmima le'i nu ro ma'a skicu ma'a da lo jbovla kei la ralju po'u la
> lojbab
> (di'u {cmima <[(le'i {nu <[(ro BOI) ma'a] [skicu ({<ma'a da> <lo jbovla KU
> 1 2 345 6 789 901
> >} VAU)]> kei} KU) (la {ralju <po'u [la lojbab] GE'U>} KU)] VAU>})
> 10 987 6 5 8 76 54 321
> which has "ma'a da" and "lo jbovla KU" inside 11 sets of parens.
> Looking at the parse trees makes the relative complexity even more
> clear. the first sentence has 72 nodes (32 words, 10 elidable
> terminators, 30 non-terminal rules), and the second has 42 nodes (17
> words, 7 elidable terminators, 18 non-terminal rules.
Nonterminal nodes tend to be in the eye of the beholder, so we should
confine ourselves to terminal nodes. In Lojban, there is no "movement",
no extraction, raising or control, or other kinds of natlang syntactic
complexity. So for Lojban, the fairest measure of syntactic complexity
is simply the number of words. But the syntactic complexity of a sentence
should be something like the amount of complexity per word - so the
upshot will be that all Lojban are equally complex, at least so long as
we have only gross measures of syntactic complexity.
Processing complexity is another matter, though.
> >> >I venture that there is no usage for which you can expressly state the
> >> >rule. That does not matter. What matters is that you know the rule,
> >> >and we can tell that you know the rule because we can observe you using
> >> >it. Working out what the rule actually says is what keeps academic
> >> >linguists employed.
> >> A ball falls to the ground. By the above logic, the ball "knows" the
> >> law of gravity.
> >I don't see that. The ball falls because acted on by gravity. There is
> >no external force acting on your usage; or at least that is a reasonable
> >assumption.
> You cannot prove or disprove that I am "using" the rule, any more than
> you can prove or disprove that the ball is "using" gravity in order to
> fall.
Are you making a point about proof, or about "using"? I presume you don't
want to rehash philosophy of the nature of proof. So I'll accept your
objection to "using". Instead, I'll say that we should presume that you
know the rule, because otherwise we could not explain your language usage.
> There is no external "force" involved other than the so-called
> rule.
I don't understand. Are you saying that the rule is an external force
acting on speakers?
> Working out what the law of gravity actually says is what keeps
> academic physicists employed. I cannot state the rule for my usage just
> as the ball cannot state the rule of gravity. (If you make the example
> one of a person falling rather than a ball, the nonsense elements are
> eliminated). Therefore the ball knows the rule of gravity just as well
> as I know the rules of grammar.
You'd better try saying this again. I don't think I follow you.
> >> The rules we attribute to English are a model of the way our minds
> >> behave when faced with examples that we label with the name of the
> >> language. It is NOT clear that the model is reality,
> >It is not clear that any model or anything is reality. This, therefore,
> >is a pointless objection.
> I should have said more strongly that the rules of grammar that academic
> linguists come up with are clearly NOT reality because they explicitly
> do not explain many real usages that violate the rules. It cannot be
> said merely that they are an incomplete model, because it is perfectly
> plausible (probably likely) that a totally contradictory model could
> come just as close to predicting what is actually acceptable.
The rules of grammar are a crucial component of a larger model that
accounts for actual usage. Each component is currently rudimentary, so
we can be pretty confident that they're wrong so far. But in principle,
if each component were complete, we could have a model of reality.
Your claim that a totally contradictory model (of the grammar component)
could come just as close to predicting what is actually acceptable may
be true of most current models, but it is not true of every possible model
in the academic vein.
> >> The rules may be (and I think ARE) an illusion, and probably at best
> >> only an approximation.
> >If a machine is able to say whether any given sentence is or isn't
> >grammatical, then it shall count as knowing the rules of grammar.
> Except for artificial languages like Lojban, being "grammatical" has
> nothing to do with reality.
What is reality? Is it so easy to know what it is? Anyway, some linguists
probably believe the rules have neurological reality. And most linguists
believe that grammaticality plays a crucial role in accounting for usage
patterns and acceptability judgements.
> Let us stick to "acceptable" which seems to be defined outside of the
> scope of the model. Chomsky can predict BETTER than any native speaker
> whetehr a sentence is "grammatical"
Only if Chomsky's theory is correct, and only at a conscious level.
> since the theory of what is grammatical has no provable connection to
> anything that the native speaker uses.
What kind of proof do you want?
What do you mean by "anything that the native speaker uses" - do you mean
bits of brain? or patterns of words? or what?
> >When we judge which language a text is in, we are asking which set of
> >linguistic rules is intended by the speaker to be used in decoding the
> >text. We don't examine the text and ask "for which language is this
> >text grammatical" - often there is no known language for which the text
> >is grammatical.
> Then either the text is not in any known language, or the definition of
> "grammatical" is so hokey as to be worthless (not to mention the fact
> that the common definition of the term "grammatical" happens to be what
> linguists term "acceptable".
The text is in a known language.
The definition of "grammatical" is not worthless.
The common definition of the term "grammatical" is not what linguists term
"acceptable".
I have explained on what basis we judge which language a text is in.
The definition of grammatical is coherent, but I don't see how it's relevant
to the question of the language of text.
The common definition of "grammatical" is "conforming to prescribed
standards". Surely this rather useless concept doesn't confuse your
understanding of the technical sense of the term?
> (Actually, of course, if I hear some words in a language, I DO decide
> whether those words are in a language that I know, and whether they
> follow the rules of that language that I know. But I think that is
> different from what you are saying.)
What I'm saying is that deciding whether those words are in a language
that you know is not dependent on deciding whether they follow the rules
of that language that you know.
> >The upshot is that actual lojban use has no bearing on the issue of what
> >the lojban rules are.
> And there is a nutshell is the idiocy of Chomskyan linguistics.
It has nothing to do with Chomskyan linguistics, which cares nothing for
invented languages and has nothing to say about them.
> It has no bearing on reality. I HOPE what you say does NOT turn out to
> be true about Lojban, and that the rules and actual usage ARE related by
> demonstrable and consistent principles.
What I say is true about Lojban (or not, depending on what the
qualificational criteria for being the grammar of Lojban are). I hope the
rules and actual usage will be related by demonstrable and consistent
principles. I am saying that it is in principle possible that they might
not be thus related.
> >> But this is irrelevant. Languages with strong word order rules may
> >> technically tolerate violations of that word order and still be
> >> understandable, but it is also possible that they will NOT be easily
> >> understood even by a native speaker. A poetic sentence like "To the
> >> store via the main drag go I". is understandable, but at some level of
> >> complication a similar sentence structure would cease to be
> >> understandable even to a native speaker in real time.
> >This is an underresearched area, so obviously you're inventing this as
> >you go along. But nonetheless it does seem reasonable to suppose that
> >at some level of complication a structure ceases to be processable even
> >to a native speaker. It should be possible to measure this. But
> >anyway, no sentences we've been discussing would stretch the processor
> >to breaking point.
> Since we have no native speakers, this is arguable.
But I'd still bet that I'm correct. I believe that our processing
capabilities are not specific to particular languages. Thus one can look
at the overall structure of sentence in Lojban or any other language
and gauge how hard to process it will be.
That will underpredict problems, I think, because there are also less well-
understood processing problems like the self-embedding one (it's
normally assumed that the problem with it is the self-embedding, but
that turns out not to be so).
> I think that they would,
But presumbably with less basis for such an opinion than I have for mine.
> and indeed that many sentences that are acceptable in printed
> text are unacceptable in fluent spoken speech, because they are only
> understandable by non-fluent analytical processes that require going
> back and reanalyzing earlier text after later ambiguities are resolved
> (i.e. garden path sentences are seldom understandable in speech).
It's true that writing resists first-pass breakdown better than speech,
but I'm surprised by your assertion that garden-path sentences are
seldom understandable in speech, since they're often discussed with
caveats that intonation may in fact tend to prevent the garden path.
However, this is not my field, so I can't tell whether you're
again inventing these facts as you go along.
> >> >My purpose is not to be obfuscatory or ornery, or at least not for the
> >> >hell of it. Lojban is defined as having syntactic capabilities far more
> >> >complex than those that actually see use. What is actually used is
> >> >pidgin lojban.
(- a point that you yourself have now conceded)
> >> By that logic, then what gets used in real life is "pidgin English"
> >> because deeply center-embedded sentences are not used or understood.
> >If we could agree on some measure of syntactic complexity appropriate to
> >both english and lojban we would find that the lojban sentence was by
> >english standards not difficult. I have already illustrated this. The
> >lojban sentence is not deeply centre embedded - at least not by english
> >standards.
> I presume that the trees used in syntactic analysis have some
> similarities to those generated by YACC.
Probably. I'd propose as a measure of complexity that non-terminal nodes
be merged with the head of the phrase they dominate, and complexity then
be based (i) on the average distance of each branch, and (ii) on the
average number of branches crossing the juncture between words. To work
out the correspondence between complexity and difficulty, we can refer
to analogously structured English sentences.
> I doubt that I could at fluent speeds understand the English version of
> what you wrote.
"the English version"? What English version?
> fi la po'u la lojbab ralju fe lei jai fau skicu be fo lo jbovla bei fe
> ma'a bei fai ro da poi ke'a me ma'a bei fi da fa di'u tinbe
> "As commanded by Lojbab the Leader, describing in Lojban words to you
> from each of those who are you, in some form, the preceding sentence
> obeys."
> Try that, or any reasonable adjustment of it, in spoken fluent form, to
> any English-native listener, and you will probably get stared at.
> Indeed, the same may be true for the written form.
I will be charitable and assume you are being deliberately perverse here.
The English is more difficult because one gardenpaths on "describing",
and it is multiply ambiguous. One would get stared at also because of
unusual locutions like "each of those who are you".
A juster comparison would take the Lojban tree and fill it with normal
English.
Here goes:
[[fi [la [po'u [la [lojbab]]] [ralju]]]
[fe [lei [jai [fau [skicu
[be [fo [lo [jbovla]]]]
[bei [fe [ma'a]]]
[bei [fai [ro [da [poi [[ke'a] me [ma'a]]]]]]]
[bei [fi [da]]]]]]]]
[fa [di'u]]
tinbe]
[[in [talks [with [the [president]]] [yesterday]]],
[the [news [of [the [sale
[of [dozens [of [missiles]]]]
[in [the [spring]]]
[to [the [guerillas [fighting [for [[Ruritania]'s
[independence]]]]]]]
[for [five [million]]]
[most [probably]]
caused
great consternation...
One might quibble with some details of the bracketing, but overall
it should be fairly uncontroversial. The English isn't brilliant -
you have to wait quite a while till you hit the verb. But SOV languages
live with that okay.
> >you assume that when you find a lojban sentence too difficult it is not
> >because you do not have good command of the language but rather because
> >that sentence would cause breakdown in even the most competent reader?
> Well, I will gladly defer to a more competent reader when one claims the
> title.
But until you are a competent reader, rather than the least incompetent
reader, you should not consider yourself a model (even provisionally) of
a competent reader.
> >> Are no English speakers fluent because no English speaker can
> >> understand a 10-level center-embedding?
> >No, I'd have thought. Your question implies someone would think Yes. Who?
> If there is no grammatical or pragmatic rule prohibiting it, then a
> speaker not being able to understand such an embedding means the
> grammatical model is incomplete, or I should indeed expect fluent
> English speakers to understand it. Otherwise the rule is invalid.
My overall theory of language use will explain why speakers won't
understand the embedding. The theory component that involves the
grammar rules won't explain it. It's a different component that
explains it.
That seems entirely reasonable to me. I don't see why you insist on
the grammar model explaining processing breakdown.
> A theory that does not explain everything, and cannot account for
> distinguishing what it can explain from what it cannot is worthless.
No theory explains everything. The other bit, I don't quite grasp.
Does the theory of evolution account for distinguishing what it can
explain (species, etc) from what it cannot (e.g. chemistry)? What
exactly is your objection?
> It is not a useful approximation, as Newton's Law has turned out to be for
> a relativistic universe, because it is perfectly possible that what
> matches up between false theory and reality is accidental, and a correct
> and correct theory might need a completely different (i.e.
> contradictory) paradigm.
Isn't this the case for all theories of natural phenomena? They may appear
sound but the soundness may ultimately prove to be illusory?
And if there is a decent rival for the current paradigm, where is it?
===And