Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:literalism

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 08:25:11 -0400

Replying to pc - for some reason I haven't seen this post directly.

At 10:22 PM 10/21/2000 +0200, Adam Raizen wrote:
>la pycyn cusku di'e
> > Even the literalist
> > allows that there are maybe a dozen (or maybe fewer, but more
> > than one) rules and NO flag for which rule is used.
>
> > Yet somehow
> > some rules are canonized and others are suspect, on no stated nor
> > defended basis: this is better (though ugly and hard to deal with)
> > that that (though immediately clear and memorable) because it uses
> > my favorite rule. Phooey!

Actually they are canonized only because Cowan put them in the book, as a 
shortening of Nick's lujvo paper to the core analysis. That analysis was 
originally pragmatically descriptive of how lujvo were actually being made 
and what the place structures seemed likely to be if one wanted to be 
systematic about it. Before then we had no place structures for more than 
50-100 lujvo, and as far as I'm concerned, a lujvo is not "real Lojban" 
until it is given such a place structure. (Hence my stress in asking 
people working on the lujvo file is to get keywords and places structures 
out there for them, and worry about whether they are the best lujvo for the 
English keyword later. The analysis itself will likely determine whether 
the meaning is any good, because the place structure coming out of the 
analysis will be unusable - in which case it can be flagged as a bad lujvo 
on the basis of the place structure that one submits.) We need to get a 
lot of lujvo place structures, and systematic analysis is the only way I 
see to get them done at a reasonable rate.

The problem of figuring out what the place structures should be was the 
constraint that made the rules canon. If it led to predictable place 
strutures that fit actual usage of the word, it was a plausible rule. A 
lujvo place structure that is not predictable according to some rule(s) 
based on the component gismu seems more ad hoc, and more suspect. If 
people come up with other systematic rules for other kinds of lujvo besides 
the canonical ones, we can probably include those rules in the dictionary 
and make them part of the canon. But we probably need a bunch of lujvo 
fitting a given rule in order to call that rule a real convention.

lojbab

--
lojbab [email-masked]
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