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At 11:08 PM 12/23/02 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
The baseline was broken on vo'a, giving one definition in the CLL and another one in the ma'oste.
If you use the word "contradictory" instead of "broken", I'll agree on that.
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.
It was recognized long ago that it conflated multiple concepts. As to English mass nouns and various other parallels. Leaving it as one word was intentional, therefore "broken" is not the right word.
An inconsistency (not quite a contradiction) in my mind was only established when it was pointed out that we have joi and jo'u in the connectives, thereby recognizing a distinction, but do not have parallel distinctions in LE and LAhE. Adding those distinctions (and I'm not hot on using CVVV space to do so, BTW; I'd rather go into xVV) thus removes an inconsistency.
byfy has charter to remove inconsistencies. It has limited charter to expand conflated concepts as a simple expansion, in order to simply dictionary writing. Let's see what we can accomplish with the limited charter, before fixing things that are not universally agreed to be "broken".
And because this conflation has not received an adequate defense from anyone.
"Adequate" is a subjective judgement.
And lo'e is broken until we figure out which of the at least 5 possible it does or should have.
"All of the above" is an acceptable answer.
I also think that we might be overstating the importance here. How many active writers are there?
Not many. And there won't ever be if we can't get a dictionary done without schism.
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.
If CLL doesn't reveal it, it may not be there. I have no idea what "word-order coup" you are talking about. And the bottom line is that if it doesn't get into the dictionary, or into errata for CLL, no such coup will exist, because "active writers" will be learning from the books, and not from jboske debates.
EVENTUALLY skilled and active writers will learn from each other THROUGH USAGE what things work successfully in communication (and which do not), and that is how the language will evolve. But that won't happen while most of the world is waiting for the dictionary to be completed and the fiddlers to stop fiddling (at least by decree, so that the learner can learn the baseline language in confidence that it won't change).
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org