[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On Mon, Dec 23, 2002 at 11:08:33PM -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> > cu'u la xod.
> >
> > >I don't care to get into glass half empty/full arguments about
> > > how much "change" constitutes a radically new language, and how little
> > is
> > > simply Book Lojban with a tiny bit of expected drift.
> >
> > Most will, though. Try selling a substance interpretation of {lo} to
> > Jay...
>
> I can't proxy for Robin, but I suspect he'd be a bit more amenable to the
> establishment of consistency than you might think.
No one has yet shown any inconsistency in the prescription of masses.
Show me an inconsistency and i'll support choosing a specific
meaning. That it doesn't mean the same thing as certain expressions
in english does *not* count as a inconsistency.
> > cu'u la .and.
> >
> > >2. The important thing at this stage is to agree that we are all engaged
> > >in the same enterprise and agree what that enterprise is. If we don't
> > >do this then we can't make progress. I see only two viable alternatives,
> > >which are entirely separate but not mutually exclusive.
> > > A. Ultra-fundamentalist. CLL is gospel except where it can
> > conclusively
> > > be proved to be self-contradictory or to contravene inviolable
> > principles.
> > > B. Lojban Mark 2. Avowedly revisionist. Changes happen through
> > consensus
> > > (or majority view if no consensus possible), with participants more
> > and
> > > less Conservative, but Fundamentalism not a virtue in itself.
> >
> > Damn. A is what the charter says. If I'm forced to choose (and I know
> > you're not forcing me, but I may be forced), I choose A. I want to
> > allow a little bit of 'Microsoft' --- a few extra cmavo. In fact the
> > charter does say the BPFK can do B if they wish --- if they get
> > consensus; and it's up to the membership to accept it.
>
> Let's establish a few guidelines here. In places where the CLL is
> demonstrably broken, the only responsible thing to do is to "contradict"
> it. (How do you contradict a contradictory text?). The baseline was broken
> on vo'a, giving one definition in the CLL and another one in the ma'oste.
> The CLL is broken on masses. (I will break this up into small sentences so
> I am understood. It is not broken because I find the book's definition to
> be ugly. It's broken because it's ambiguous, conflating two concepts. And
But that's not a contradiction.
> because this conflation has not received an adequate defense from anyone.
I think I've defended it adequatly by Appeal to Grice. If grice
works for our OR operator, it's certainly plenty for our mass gadri.
> And the usages were used in contradictory manners, just like vo'a was.)
How?
> And lo'e is broken until we figure out which of the at least 5 possible it
> does or should have.
lo'e is not broken. What's broken is that so many (well only a
couple) lojbanists want to hijack it to their own meanings. CLL
gives it a high-level definition without details, but that doesn't
give license to ignore it---we can figure out the low-level details,
but we can't change the end result of what they mean. The prototype
and the average views of lo'e work fine and we can debate them, but
the Unique view and the xorxes do-whatever-the-speaker-wants view
are both poorly defined and not true to the intended meaning of the
cmavo.
> So Nick, be a fundamentalist, but that's only an option in cases where
> there is a self-coherent fundamentalist line. If fundamentalism means that
> the BF will leave behind incoherency, you might as well not spend your
> time at it -- that's how things already are!
There's far less inconsistency than you are claiming. Some things
are poorly defined, but that is not the same as full contradictions.
The book contradicts itself on importingness of ro (because of naku
rules). It contradicts the ma'oste on vo'a and the place structure
of tamsmi. These are things we can discuss. Whether "lo broda"
means "da poi broda" is *not* legitimate to debate if we want to
have *a* language. Tinkerers can tinker forever and never stop,
because nothing is ever *actually* better than anything else (look
at how the IAL weenies do this stuff---that's exactly what we want
to avoid).
> I also think that we might be overstating the importance here. How many
> active writers are there? I think that Jorge and I will follow the
> Excellent Solution, no matter what Nick and Jordan say. I like it, and I
> am going to smoke it. Because I have already resigned to my own need to
> learn Lojban from scratch anyway ever since you formalists pulled your
> word-order coup. The CLL didn't reveal that, but "there" it was. So this
> time, I'd like what I learn not to be broken. And if that means a
> "different dialect", tough!
Well, that just sucks fat balls---such things may kill your chances
of ever being able to have real fluent conversations in the language,
and the chances of the language ever getting bigger than a couple
dozen people.
Dunno what else to say. Obviously what you do is up to you, but I
find it somewhat unfortunate that *every* single issue must result
in mini-schisms where half of lojbanists choose one and the other
half choose another. We need a final authority so that there's
*one* lojban, whatever it is, because this "i'm doing it my way,
screw you guys" crap is just rediculously childish.
--
Jordan DeLong - fracture@hidden.email
lu zo'o loi censa bakni cu terzba le zaltapla poi xagrai li'u
sei la mark. tuen. cusku
Attachment:
bineffOQkdmKF.bin
Description: application/ygp-stripped