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Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:43:13 -0400
Message-ID: <55b258c20910172043k5ac91de9te2681d92c79b2d87@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: [jbovlaste] Re: What would happen if xu and ko were put together?
From: Craig Daniel <teucer@pobox.com>
To: jbovlaste@lojban.org
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On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 11:21 PM, 白松 <baisong@gvbchina.org.cn> wrote:
> I see both points:
>
> (1) Rephrasing into a natural langauge (read: English) introduces
> non-inherent grammatical incompatibilities. This sentence is valid.
>
> (2) No, in fact, there is an inherent pragmatic usage to utterances and
> lojban treats these fundamental usages unambiguously by separating them.
> This sentence is invalid.
>
> As an idealist, I'd like to say that the prevailing logic resides in
> argument (1), because the resulting interpretations seem very liberating,
> which is supposedly one of lojban's goals. This conclusion seems to inspire
> the imagination.
>
> As a practical non-elite-oldbie (haha, no offense?), I'd take argument (2)'s
> caution to heart. Indeed, from a learner's perspective, I imagine not only
> native-Enlgish-speakers would find difficulty understanding how to respond
> (or *if* to respond) that that statement. And lojban also tries to minimize
> ambiguity. This conclusion seems like a better bug-fix.

As a quasi-oldbie, I side with number one with respect to "ko ma
klama" (which I see as pretty unambiguously if unexpectedly asking
what's going on and ordering it to continue - perhaps "make up your
mind and get going!"), but lean toward number two when it comes to "xu
ko klama."

Actually, not quite. There's nothing *invalid* about "xu ko klama" -
it's parseable, per the BNF rules, so it is grammatical and valid. On
the other hand, there's also nothing invalid about "zi'o crino." Like
"zi'o crino," it isn't clear at this time that "xu ko klama" means
anything, and as I see it equally strong arguments can be made for
"Go! Will you comply?" and "Do I insist that you go?" I fully expect
that within not too terribly many years, usage will have decided that
one of these two interpretations is correct, at which point "xu ko"
will be an unquestionably valid part of the language. Until it's at
least trending one way or the other, though, I'm not going to use it
in cases where context wouldn't make it clear.

Hm. You could sort of tease the two apart as being semantically
equivalent (but not syntactically) to "ko klama .i xu go'i" and "xu
klama .i ko go'i" or similar.

 - mi'e .kreig.