History: Suggestions for CLL, second edition

Preview of version: 31

For errata relating to the current edition of the CLL, see CLL, aka Reference Grammar, Errata. For errata related to the 4th Baseline Grammar, see CLL PEG Errata.

General considerations

  1. Lojban terms are used for most parts of speech, except for quantifiers and descriptors. Needlessly inconsistent?
    • In particular (this list is not exhaustive),
      • quantifier->something with {snicne}? (though personally I (zort) disagree with the veljvo of {snicne})
      • quantified variable->something with {snicne}?
      • descriptor->gadri
      • description->gadri sumti (I haven't actually seen this used)
      • attitudinal->cnima'o
      • terminator->fa'orma'o
      • modal->sumti tcita
      • vocative->jikma'o? rinsyma'o?
      • evidential->veljivma'o?
  2. It would be better if formal definitions were separated from comments, and not going mixed.
  3. It would be better if numbered were not only chapters and sections, but also sentences like in the Bible.
    • Exactly what would be the benefit of adding "verse" numbers? We can easily cite specific sentences without the need to do this. For example, citing from the online refgram: 9.3.7.2 (Chapter 9, section 3, paragraph 7, sentence 2): "Therefore, it is perfectly all right to scramble...." Or for examples: 9.3-3.3 (Chapter 9, section 3, example 3.3): "3.3) klama fa mi fi la .atlantas. ...." mi'e.aionys.
  4. There should be more illustration and diagrams. For instance, with termsets, show with lines and/or colour coding how two sentences are equivalent. See The Japanese Wikipedia for some other examples.
  5. Chapter 4 needs to go somewhere else, ideally near the end. It's crazy to give all that crap to newbies.
    • It is a specification, not a tutorial. It makes sense to start with orthography, follow with morphology, and then the continue with the rest of the language. mi'e.djeims.
  6. Minimum 2 sentence explanation for every cmavo (excluding ones that are part of a pattern like {fo'i}, of course). Chapter 13 is particularly guilty of the length of the explanation of a cmavo seemingly being inversely proportional to the number of cmavo explained in the section; some just get two gloss words worth of explanation, and it's rather opaque.
  7. Maybe the fact that denpabu are optional in writing should be reinforced, since people seem to forget that. Right now it's only mentioned once, early in the book, in a little paragraph in chapter 3. It could be said again in chapter 19 and/or chapter 4.
  8. The general idea of terminators and particularly elision is never discussed as such in the book. Chapter 5.5 is the first mention of a elidable terminators, with the first use of the phrase elidable terminator occurring in Chapter 5.7. I think the concept of terminators, cmavo opening grammatical constructs, and elision should be dealt with in it's own section. At the very least, the construct should be defined.1

Typographical

The brush-stroke placeholders for logical connectives should be written in "blackboard bold" instead, to make it look more form

  • I remember this section being confusing to me because of the brushstroke letters. Suddenly the book became much more formal (in the mathematical sense) and I didn't know what that signified. Writing them as of "-a -e -i -o" might be better, since the hyphen indicates they are not themselves words, without introducing a strange new typographical convention. The book already uses hyphens to show that rafsi are not words, so this would be consistent. Or since "a e i o" actually are words, perhaps they could be used directly. mi'e.paldanyli.

Per section

Chapter 3

Section 6

  1. Section 6, restriction no. 2 already forbids 8 of the 12 consonant pairs that are forbidden by restriction no. 3; perhaps it's better to just explicitly forbid the pairs "cs", "jz", "sc" and "zj" like in the last restriction.
    • I kind of like that the explanation for those pairs being forbidden is given, even if it includes things already forbidden. I would like it slightly better if the word "sibilant" were used. Perhaps for consistency the reason could be given for the last restriction instead of listing seemingly-random pairs. .imi'e .skaryzgik.
      • Agreed mi'e.aionys.

Section 9

  1. A bit after example 9.5, the explanation of how to stress words is ambiguous. A possible incorrect interpretation:
    set stressed_syllable = penultimate_syllable;
    while (stressed_syllable contains "l|m|n|r|y"
             && stressed_syllable != first_syllable) {
         stressed_syllable = syllable_before(stressed_syllable);
    }
    None of the examples demonstrate that only syllables containing "l|m|n|r" as syllables on their own are to be skipped, nor that skipped syllables are to be ignored before you start counting as opposed to skipped while you're counting. The following examples would make it clearer: {djanatyn} is pronounced {DJAnatyn} (not {djaNAtyn}), and {patrica} is pronounced {paTRIca} (not {PAtrica}).

Section 12

  • The tengwar table should use actual tengwar in addition to their names, since we now have Unicode (CSUR) and good fonts.
  • The Cyrillic letters given map to 'abcdefgijklmnoprstuvxyz'? That doesn't seem totally obvious. mi'e.djeims.

Chapter 4

Section 7

  • In the procedure for making a non-Lojban word into a valid Stage 3 fu'ivla, double consonants are to be eliminated before the sounds are to be converted to their closest Lojban equivalents, but it is possible that consecutive consonants have different sounds (like in 'eccentric'). So these actions should swap places. The same goes for section 8, in the procedure for Lojbanizing a name.

Chapter 5

Section 14

  • The three letter language abbreviations were probably used to save space, but now that we have actual tables we can safely write the full names of the languages.

Section 16

  • The big list of the 40 possible groupings of "pretty little girls school" could be made into a nice, clean table. It would look something like this:
    ...melbi melbi...cmalu cmalu...nixli nixli...ckule ckule... grouping translation
    ((pretty little) girl) school school for girls who are beautifully small
    je ((pretty and little) girl) school school for girls who are beautiful and small
    bo je ((pretty little) and girl) schoolschool for girls and for beautifully small things
    ke ke'e je ((pretty little) girl) and schoolthing which is a school and a beautifully small girl
    je je ((pretty and little) and girl) schoolschool for things which are beautiful, small, and girls

Chapter 10

  • It would be nice if there was a template for compound tenses around the end of the chapter, like the template for compound cnima'o in chapter 13 section 8.

Chapter 13

Section 15

  • Couldn't the {se'u}s be elided since their sumti are before their selbri?

Chapter 16

Section 9

  • It says "for no x" (noda) is the same as "it is false for some x" (naku su'oda). I (mi'e zort) interpret "it is false for some x" as "there is an x such that it is false" (su'oda naku), not "it is false that for some x it is true" (naku su'oda), so it should be changed to "it is false that for some x".

History

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Information Version
Fri 01 of Feb, 2013 02:50 GMT zort from 70.29.36.158 Further improved earlier correction of calque. 37
Tue 29 of Jan, 2013 03:05 GMT zort from 70.29.75.104 Corrected my calque :X 36
Thu 24 of Jan, 2013 03:58 GMT zort from 70.29.75.104 Various comments and changes. 35
Fri 27 of Jan, 2012 04:24 GMT brablonau from 174.136.103.210 clarify Chap. 21, Sec. 2, EBNF intro Rule 6. 34
Fri 04 of Feb, 2011 20:50 GMT alyn.post from 68.35.165.60 Add section on cultural neutrality including one obvious example. 33
Fri 04 of Feb, 2011 20:42 GMT alyn.post from 68.35.165.60 include mailing list material from Luke, errata from myself, and reorganize this page. 32
Fri 04 of Feb, 2011 17:58 GMT alyn.post from 68.35.165.60 discussion elidable terminators 31
Tue 01 of Feb, 2011 23:32 GMT alyn.post from 68.35.165.60 Add links to other CLL errata pages. 30
Sat 15 of Jan, 2011 01:10 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Chapter 13 section 15 elision suggestion. 29
Mon 03 of Jan, 2011 02:18 GMT purpleposeidon from 128.120.185.88 28
Sun 02 of Jan, 2011 19:24 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Chapter 5 section 14 suggestion. 27
Fri 31 of Dec, 2010 19:03 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 evidential->veljivma'o? 26
Fri 31 of Dec, 2010 06:31 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Added "vocative" to list of english->lojban terms. 25
Fri 31 of Dec, 2010 06:22 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Added suggestion for table of all the "pretty little girls school" groupings. 24
Thu 30 of Dec, 2010 00:08 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Removed my "separate formal definitions" suggestion. 23
Thu 30 of Dec, 2010 00:04 GMT zort from 70.26.52.118 Added "reinforce optional denpabu" suggestion. 22
Mon 27 of Dec, 2010 20:45 GMT zort from 70.26.56.185 Added "separate chapter with formal definitions" remark. 21
Mon 27 of Dec, 2010 20:21 GMT zort from 70.26.56.185 Added "longer explanations" suggestion, removed HTML tables suggestion, added some lojban translations for terms which are conventionally english. 20
Tue 07 of Dec, 2010 22:51 GMT zort from 70.26.57.190 19
Tue 07 of Dec, 2010 18:30 GMT zort from 70.26.57.190 Added chapter 10 compound tense template suggestion. 18
Mon 29 of Nov, 2010 05:18 GMT zort from 70.29.38.117 Chapter 16 section 9 clarification suggestion. 17
Tue 09 of Nov, 2010 21:47 GMT zort from 70.29.36.10 Organized things a little, added HTML tables suggestion. 16
Sun 07 of Nov, 2010 21:08 GMT zort from 70.29.36.10 Added suggestion for chapter 3. 15
Sun 07 of Nov, 2010 20:09 GMT arj from 178.74.14.177 tengwar 14
Tue 26 of Oct, 2010 06:13 GMT rlpowell from 173.13.139.233 13
Thu 09 of Sep, 2010 09:40 GMT arj from 213.236.208.22 Added comments about illustrations, fixed nesting in the list 12
Wed 14 of Apr, 2010 17:39 GMT paul-donnelly from 71.157.174.185 11
Wed 14 of Apr, 2010 14:16 GMT eyeonus from 132.178.238.2 10
Wed 14 of Apr, 2010 14:03 GMT eyeonus from 132.178.238.2 9
Wed 14 of Apr, 2010 14:03 GMT eyeonus from 132.178.238.2 8
Tue 06 of May, 2008 17:41 GMT skaryzgik from 128.42.219.6 7
Sat 28 of Jan, 2006 07:33 GMT inego from 212.17.3.19 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. --> 1.2.3.4.5. 6
Sat 28 of Jan, 2006 07:32 GMT inego from 212.17.3.19 5
Wed 14 of Sep, 2005 21:45 GMT J from 212.127.211.94 4
Sun 17 of Jul, 2005 20:21 GMT arj from 129.241.222.49 brush-stroke placeholders 3
Thu 03 of Mar, 2005 02:59 GMT J from 212.127.211.94 2
Tue 15 of Feb, 2005 14:21 GMT arj from 129.241.223.130 Moved comment from CLL errata 1
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