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F33r the Corpus (was: Digest Number 196)



On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, And Rosta wrote:


> Still, you, having, as BF-tsar, to serve the two gods of Conservatism
> and Formalism, suffer most from the effects of conservatism. E.g. the
> gadri system is a pile of incoherent shite, it could be fixed easily by
> redoing it from scratch, but no, the people who have half learnt the
> pile of incoherent shite & believe they have learnt something worth
> knowing insist that the fix be done by bodging -- with the utmost
> difficulty & agony -- the pile of incoherent shite into something less
> incoherent. But do these people do the hard work themselves?


Conservatism is a position which would make sense if there existed a
corpus. By corpus I mean a substantial amount of content -- written or
spoken -- by reasonably fluent people. All we have is a few hundred K of
scratchings at the preschool level. Such jibber jabber is unworthy of
circumscribing anyone's explorations.

It is an act of denial to respect a corpus written by people who didn't
understand their word for "the".


> The way I have come to see things, the vast majority of Lojbanists want
> a language that is as stable as possible but logically sound (even
> though they leave it to others to ensure that it is logically sound, and
> will blithely speak a logically unsound language so long as they don't
> realize they're doing so). Lojban will be the language these people
> want. There is no practical means of changing this, and no decent moral
> justification for denying these people the language they want.


Logically sound? I'll settle for a language in which we can agree how to
ask for a doctor.



-- 
.o'i mu xagji sofybakni cu zvati le purdi
[Caution!] There are five hungry Soviet cows in the garden!