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At 02:06 AM 12/31/02 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
Just throwing this in, because I don't honestly think this will lead anywhere. For now, I think "countable innards = collective, uncountable innards = substance" is good... ... but if you slice each person precisely in half, you still have a substance with countable innards. Because hemi-humans are not the product of the universal grinder; but they sure don't belong to any notion of collective of humans, either. Hm. This is bad.
I don't see the problem. Hemi-humans don't display the emergent properties of the mass. If you cut all human beings in half, then loi xadbyremna would not be equivalent to loi remna. Similarly, if you cut all water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, or even into quarks, it will cease to be loi djacu.
> Clearly the word was added to refer to mathematical sets (and I > believe it > was added by pc, but that would take more digging to verify). Not necessarily; the wording seems to me to leave collectives open, and some logicians have conflated math sets and collectives. The routine rejoinder to this is "you can't burn a mathematical set, but you can burn a deck of cards." But if we've survived the conflation of everything in the lojbanmass, I'd need grounds firmer than that to say Lojban can't survive a conflation of collective and set. The gi'uste has done it for years.
If everyone says so, and the gismu list is baselined, then that is the way it is.
So a collective is girzu. Well, that's progress...
Glad one of my ideas is flying %^)
>> Okay: the intent was to contrast with Nick's variety of pragmatic >> fundamentalism, which is manifest also sometimes in you. I suppose >> that that can be summed up as "you needn't honour the letter so >> long as you honour the spirit". > Which I believe was always the intent in defining the baseline;> treating CLL as scripture to be taken literally came about only when there was> disagreement whether a particular usage was honoring the spirit. If> there was a way to go back to that point of view, I'd love it (that may be a> way that Academic Lojbanists can experiment and still remain within the > greater community of Microsoft Lojbanists). You'd love it? Even when it results in CLL being pulped? That's not what you were saying two weeks ago.
It would not be pulped. It would simply be taken with a little less seriousness than people now do with regard to parsing every word literally. I think I am agreeing with John on this, in other words.
No, the time for flexible exegesis is past: we have to get the prescription of the language right, not allow everything and nothing.
Oh I agree. But the prescription is not written in unambiguous Lojban by omniscient godlings, so we need to live with the possibility that the prescriptive documents may need to be followed in spirit when the letter proves insufficient.
While the baseline is so loosely worded that these kinds of issues can fester, it is not doing its job. And I do not recognise any authority to do exegesis any more than the BPFK: Supplication hasn't worked, Usage gives us Jorge :-) , Logic gives us jboske :-( . The spirit? No, I won't deal with phantoms. I deal with the word, and I expand on it.
Your decision; I'll abide.
That said, of course there will be flexibility and negotiation in the BPFK; how can there not. But we are here to produce something cogent; not to perpetuate holes and confusion.
I agree. 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