Re: TECH(?): can everyone write impeccably grammatical Lojban?

[And Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

>From Ivan:
> >  From: And Rosta <ucleaar@UCL>
> >  but in principle I suppose the technical lojbo line is that if it's
> >  ungrammatical then it's not Lojban.
> As is the technical linguistic line, for that matter: if it doesn't
> follow the grammar of L, then it is not L, it is another language.
>
> >  So basically if you
> >  elide one terminator  too many or whatever you've had it.
>
> Yes.  The reason being that it is damn difficult to formulate any
> criteria for near-Lojbanness (or near-correctness) of a text.  Try to
> imagine a grammar of near-correct English -- a set of rules that
> generate utterances which may not be grammatical English, but from which
> someone with competence in English would be able to derive a meaning.
> (I didn't say write it, just imagine it.  :-))

A significant amount of spoken & written text in all languages is
ungrammatical. But we manage to process it without problems.

We produce and comprehend utterances using more than our knowledge of
grammar. So we can use these additional mechanisms in tandem with
our knowledge of grammar to produce and comprehend utterances that
aren't generated by the grammar.

The optimal computer parser would surely manage at least as well as
we do with ungrammatical input. Of course I don't claim that this
parser would be easy to write.

I don't think that any utterance is "in" any particular language.
It may represent text generated by many different grammars. Or it
may represent text not generated by any grammar - or at least
not by any grammar anyone knows. We say a text is "in" English
if English grammar is the most efficacious for 'decoding' it.
This is why G.M.Hopkins, E.E.Cummings, etc., are thought of as
poets who wrote in English.

All this is of course pertinent to Lojban. Rigorous formalization
of Lojban grammar is to be applauded, but this should not mean
that Lojban more than other languages requires its speakers
to produce rigorously grammatical text.

---
And.