[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Gaps and Ungaps



cu'u la xod

Two years ago I would have responded with hysterical flamery. Now, I
agree. When the Leading Lights remain in such fumbling disarray week after
week over such fundamental concepts, can Lojban be said to have produced
any emergent consciousness yet? .iseni'ibo .a'o da na'eca zo'onai jeba
.a'o veldrani le lojbo

Let me be more fundamentalist than xod, which is probably my job. :-) There is a lot of Lojban that we get, and that needs to be codified, and that has been tried in usage (or at least, usage has decisive things to say.)

There are things that were and are a mess, and most people have not known what they are doing.

It is in our interest politically to minimise the latter class, if community consensus is to be reached. Usage must be maximised. And we have learned a lot in the past 10 (or 40) years; we do have a body of usage. There is much of Lojban that is clear now, or will be clear once the lore is sifted.

However, we will not be able to eliminate the class of underspecified and confused Lojban -- which we either get a formulation of now, or leave till future generations.

gadri are clearly in such a class.

A lot can be left for future generations (my formula of "the formalists, in their own time on their own dime" --- the mathematical formalisation of Lojban that a Formalist Academy may issue in 20 years.) The broad outlines of what the hell Lojban gadri are --- cannot wait so long. This needs to be fixed now, so that we can have something intelligible to teach on what gadri do. That means working out lo'e, loi, and any new gadri and LAhE that will get us by.

We can learn and change -- witness the ka...ce'u sea-change. But we need to know what we're talking about.


--
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
* Dr Nick Nicholas,  French & Italian Studies       nickn@hidden.email *
  University of Melbourne, Australia             http://www.opoudjis.net
*    "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the       *
  circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987.    *
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****