From rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Wed Jan 26 11:49:17 2005 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:49:17 -0800 (PST) Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.34) id 1CttAD-0003g1-4q for lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org; Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:49:17 -0800 Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 11:49:17 -0800 To: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Single numbers as years Message-ID: <20050126194917.GW20235@chain.digitalkingdom.org> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.6+20040907i From: Robin Lee Powell X-archive-position: 1061 X-Approved-By: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-original-sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@chain.digitalkingdom.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 09:31:54AM -0400, Betsemes wrote: > In chapter 5 of Lojban for Beginners, this comment is written: > "More recently there has been a proposal to make single numbers > refer by default to year rather than day; the controversy on this > has not settled down yet." Nick's solution to this is actually pretty obviously the best possible, but oddly enough still encounters resistance. :-) Nick's proposal is to always use 4 digits for years, and assume that the date is endian in some fashion (i.e. month/day/year is not allowed). Then de'i li plus any of the following are all unambiguous (ignoring the "ambiguity" of not specifying part of the date, which we all want the option of): pa -- "the first" pa pi'e re -- "the first of February" pa pi'e re pi'e pa ki'o -- "the first of February of 2000" pa ki'o -- "the year 2000" pa ki'o pi'e ci -- "March of the year 2000" pa ki'o pi'e ci pi'e vo -- "the 4th of March of the year 2000" > This refers to the construct expressed as "li " which in > case of dates refers to the day of month. There has to be more to the construct than that. Probably "de'i li " or something. "li " is just a sumti, and has no more intrinsic meaning then writing "5" by itself does in English. > I guess that this proposal could have some time of having been > proposed so I want to know what have been decided about this if > anything. No formal committee has looked at the date handling issue. The BPFK should probably decide on *something* as a default when we do {de'i}, though. "Letting usage decide" aside, this is one of the single largest source of newbie questions. > (If my opinion counts and it maybe doesn't; I don't like > those irregularities in programming languages, much worse is the > case in human languages. I prefer to use cmene for years). Umm, huh? How would you use cmene for years, exactly? "panononos"? -Robin -- http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/ Reason #237 To Learn Lojban: "Homonyms: Their Grate!" Proud Supporter of the Singularity Institute - http://singinst.org/