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xod: > On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote: > > We can learn and change -- witness the ka...ce'u sea-change... > Sorry, but for every ka-ce'u, there's a six Cowans re-asserting the > factivity of djuno. I thought that was shot down good and proper, but can > I really be sure without double-checking the archives??? When we debated djuno there were three options: 1. Djuno is factive: truth of x2 is presupposed; x2 remains true even if djuno is negated. 2. x2 is claimed to be true. X djuno Y only if Y is true. Negated djuno makes no claim or presupposition about truth of x2. 3. Truth of x2 is immaterial to djuno; X can know Y even if Y is false. There was a pretty strong (though perhaps not universal) consensus on (2), strong enough for the matter to appear settled at the time. If John has just talked about "the factivity of djuno", I'm pretty sure he was speaking loosely, and in fact referring to (2), not to (1). > At this rate it > will be 40 more years until the dust settles. But the point was: what > credence can we give the corpus, written by novices relative to the sages > who are bumbling over the Lojban form of "the"? The disturbing implication > of AndR's practically irrefutable assessment is that we may have to drift > the language away from the corpus, judging it to actually be *in error*, > written by people who didn't have enough of a clue wtf they were saying -- > this includes all present company. Maybe this means I'm signing up for > your fundamentalist dialect, Nick Let me hasten to add that this doesn't mean the corpus is invalid in every respect. For one thing, usage *arguably* trumps the official prescription in things like experimental gismu, gismu place structures, ka'enai, etc. These are supposed to be examples of things where Formalism has no preference between the version from usage and the version from the prescription. For another thing, I think jboskeists agree that where gismu usage does not conflict with the info in the gimste, gismu meaning is fleshed out and firmed up through usage. More generally, there are tracts of the language that Formalism leaves to usage to decide. --And.