From uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin Sat Mar 6 22:58:27 2010 Date: Mon, 6 Aug 90 16:59:59 EDT From: "Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) To: lojban-list@snark.thyrsus.com Cc: protin@PICA.ARMY.MIL Subject: times, dates, images, and S-W X-From-Space-Date: Mon Aug 6 16:59:59 1990 X-From-Space-Address: uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin Message-ID: Folks, (I am a little slow in my reading and am just now responding to things in the May issue of "ju'i lobypli".) On the subject of rationalizing the conventions for time and date representations, the proposals (discussions between John Hodges & Bob) were unimpressive, to put it mildly. I hope you have names for the months because I will strongly resist all those silly colons. There are two ways that I currently use for representing dates: (1) as number of day within month followed by name of month folowed by year as in 06 August 90 or (2) as year followed by two digit number of month followed by two digit day of the month as in 900806 or 19900806 The first of this is more (human) user friendly and requires no extra punctuation or spacing: "06Aug90" can be unambiguously parsed. The second form is equally unambiguous, has not extraneous punctuation, and has the fine feature that it can be sorted correctly by dumb programs. (I will avoid a long discussion of the nonsense of mm/dd/yy mentioning only that it is frequently indistinguishible from dd/mm/yy and both forms have very large followings.) Without a major reform of the calander, I see very little reason to do much with the representation. The same goes even more so for the clocks and time representation. The abbreviations "AM." and "PM." have served fine in the dual role of selecting which cycle of the clock together with identifying the context for interpreting the numbers (the numbers preceding are hour or hour:minutes or hours:minutes:seconds). I again have found for dealing with dumb programs that it is usually just fine to to extend the second form of date with a dot, ".", and a twenty four hour clock without the colons, eg. 900806.161632576 being 4:16:32.576 PM 08 Aug 90 Now if you want to redefine all our clocks to fill a day with 100,000 units approximately equal to 0.864 seconds ... As the mind heals itself by forgeting painful things so now the memory of "image languages" fades. I would like to share with you all my views of how language shapes society's thoughts (Sapir-Whorf). Individuals, in order to think symbolically, must have symbols with which to model the thing they are thinking about. Society requires individuals to internalize, at least a certain level of proficiency, one representation scheme, that of the society's language. Some of us use this representation scheme very heavily (myself included) while others have personal representation schemes such that they must translate from their personal thoughts into their "mother" tongue to communicate their ideas to others (my best friend is like this). Clearly only those thoughts that can be represented in some scheme can ever be thought about and only those that can be translated into a shared language can be past on (those that can't will die with the individual). These are the hard limits but in practice most thoughts can be --More-- represented in most languages, (but exceptions exist like "time" and the Hopi Indians). The "soft" limits are like smoking and cancer. You can get cancer of the lungs without smoking and you can smoke without getting cancer, but statistics say that smoking increases the likelihood of getting cancer. So it is with thought and language. Ideas that are easier to represent will be more likely to be thought about and shared. Things that are more similar in their representations will be more likely to be involved in analogies. Operations on thoughts that are easier with a given representation will be more likely to be performed than the difficult operations. I have seen these limits first hand! I have had problems in mathematics where single statements expanded to fill a page. Working on those problems required dedication and meticulousness because each manipulation step involved transcribing a whole page of representation and a single mistake ruined the whole thing. It should be no wonder that scientists working on complex problems in physics (relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics) developed very concise representations for both the data and the operations to be performed on the data. Nor should come as a surprise that discoveries in the substance of the field seem to occur very close temporally to discoveries in the methods of representation in the field. --More--  thank you all for this forum, Arthur Protin Arthur Protin These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss or this installation. ? On Arthur Protin's message of 6 Aug 90 16:59:59 EDT Subject: times, dates, images, and S-W > I hope you have names for the > months because I will strongly resist all those silly colons. 1. The 'colons' correspond to the slashes in 08/30/1990. As Dave Matuszek mentions in another message, some separator is mandatory between the date components, especially in speech, if we want to preserve unambiguity in syntax. There are, after all, three separate numbers there. If you don't believe this, try subtracting two dates to determine the number of days between them. Each of the separate numbers is in a different base. The number 'colon' "pi'e" is really a decimal point that says that the digits on each side of the point are in different number bases. 2. The months have names - the number of the month + "-mast" from "masti" e.g. pamast. remast. cimast. So the abbreviation to digit representation is natural. Grammatically, though, if you want to express a date as numbers plus month name, you have to turn ALL of the numbers into names which is cumbersome to write (although some conventions have been used for this such as: "la 6d. 8m. 90n.") There is NO special grammar set up for dates; you must use the grammar for any other MEX or pseudo-MEX expression to validly express dates (or times) in Lojban. 3. I used the colon because we DO you colons for time-of-day. Why use a different mark for dates when we use the same word for separators. Of course, just to be disconcerting, I sometimes use semicolons for both; but only if I'm feeling ornery (and not when I'm trying to establish a convention). > (I will avoid a long discussion of the nonsense of mm/dd/yy > mentioning only that it is frequently indistinguishible from dd/mm/yy > and both forms have very large followings.) 4. From what I've determined, mm/dd/yy is found ONLY in America, and not universally here - the military uses Arthur's 1st version - dd MON yr where the month is in text. We also don't have gismu for the American (formerly 'English') measurement units, where the U.S. is out of step with the world. 5. In addition to worldwide convention, we use dd;mm;yy for another reason that is much more linguistic. This order gives the most important and less likely to be known information FIRST, allowing ellipsis of the rest. If I say I wrote this on the 3rd, you infer the month and the year the current ones. If I say I wrote in on 3 Sept, you can guess the year is 1990. But if year is first, it can never be left out (except possibly with a null followed by the 'colon'), likewise year and month. Ease of writing sorting programs, or in fact any computer advantage at the expense of human pragmatics takes the lowest priority in Lojban design. We also try to avoid any argument based on aesthetics, since we have good reason to suspect that American aesthetics in language is quite different from other languages, and Lojban must preserve its cultural neutrality, especially against American biases, if it is to be accepted. On the other hand Zipf's law is a valid linguistic argument. It says that most frequently used forms should be shorter, (and that if not, people will tend to MAKE them shorter - which would destroy Lojban's unambiguity if done haphazardly). Thus we need a convention, and one that allows leaving out unneeded information when this will shorten the form. > Without a major reform of the calander, I see very little reason > to do much with the representation. The same goes even more so for the > clocks and time representation. The abbreviations "AM." and "PM." have > served fine in the dual role of selecting which cycle of the clock > together with identifying the context for interpreting the numbers > (the numbers preceding are hour or hour:minutes or hours:minutes:seconds). > I again have found for dealing with dumb programs that it is usually > just fine to to extend the second form of date with a dot, ".", and > a twenty four hour clock without the colons, eg. > 900806.161632576 > being > 4:16:32.576 PM 08 Aug 90 6. We are NOT trying for calendar reform. Lojban is novel enough that we don't need to reform the unreformable. However, we do need a single convention in a language to be used for communicating between cultures that do not share a common convention. The 12 vs. 24 hour clock is such an inconsistency. Apparently in non-U.S. environments (as well as the U.S. military), 24-hour clocks are more common than 12 hour clocks. Most people in the U.S. use digital clocks and watches as well. So 'which cycle of the clock' is inherently a biased statement towards preserving an obsolescent and declining system. We have to recognize that it exists, but we do not have to favor it. We also need to be reasonably clear as to what our convention is, though. If you see "900806.161632576" you have no way to even tell it is a date, much less what the convention is for interpreting it. We want to use the shortest form that makes it clear that a convention is being used and whic possibly suggests what that convention is to someone not used to using it. 7. In Arthur's final example, he adds a dot - this again is the Lojban "pi'e" colon. You wouldn't want someone to think it was a decimal point. So don't use one. On the other hand, he does use a decimal point in the seconds of his time in the last line, using a colon for the other separators. So On Arthur Protin's message of 6 Aug 90 16:59:59 EDT Subject: times, dates, images, and S-W > I hope you have names for the > months because I will strongly resist all those silly colons. 1. The 'colons' correspond to the slashes in 08/30/1990. As Dave Matuszek mentions in another message, some separator is mandatory between the date components, especially in speech, if we want to preserve unambiguity in syntax. There are, after all, three separate numbers there. If you don't believe this, try subtracting two dates to determine the number of days between them. Each of the separate numbers is in a different base. The number 'colon' "pi'e" is really a decimal point that says that the digits on each side of the point are in different number bases. 2. The months have names - the number of the month + "-mast" from "masti" e.g. pamast. remast. cimast. So the abbreviation to digit representation is natural. Grammatically, though, if you want to express a date as numbers plus month name, you have to turn ALL of the numbers into names which is cumbersome to write (although some conventions have been used for this such as: "la 6d. 8m. 90n.") There is NO special grammar set up for dates; you must use the grammar for any other MEX or pseudo-MEX expression to validly express dates (or times) in Lojban. 3. I used the colon because we DO you colons for time-of-day. Why use a different mark for dates when we use the same word for separators. Of course, just to be disconcerting, I sometimes use semicolons for both; but only if I'm feeling ornery (and not when I'm trying to establish a convention). > (I will avoid a long discussion of the nonsense of mm/dd/yy > mentioning only that it is frequently indistinguishible from dd/mm/yy > and both forms have very large followings.) 4. From what I've determined, mm/dd/yy is found ONLY in America, and not universally here - the military uses Arthur's 1st version - dd MON yr where the month is in text. We also don't have gismu for the American (formerly 'English') measurement units, where the U.S. is out of step with the world. 5. In addition to worldwide convention, we use dd;mm;yy for another reason that is much more linguistic. This order gives the most important and less likely to be known information FIRST, allowing ellipsis of the rest. If I say I wrote this on the 3rd, you infer the month and the year the current ones. If I say I wrote in on 3 Sept, you can guess the year is 1990. But if year is first, it can never be left out (except possibly with a null followed by the 'colon'), likewise year and month. Ease of writing sorting programs, or in fact any computer advantage at the expense of human pragmatics takes the lowest priority in Lojban design. We also try to avoid any argument based on aesthetics, since we have good reason to suspect that American aesthetics in language is quite different from other languages, and Lojban must preserve its cultural neutrality, especially against American biases, if it is to be accepted. On the other hand Zipf's law is a valid linguistic argument. It says that most frequently used forms should be shorter, (and that if not, people will tend to MAKE them shorter - which would destroy Lojban's unambiguity if done haphazardly). Thus we need a convention, and one that allows leaving out unneeded information when this will shorten the form. > Without a major reform of the calander, I see very little reason > to do much with the representation. The same goes even more so for the > clocks and time representation. The abbreviations "AM." and "PM." have > served fine in the dual role of selecting which cycle of the clock > together with identifying the context for interpreting the numbers > (the numbers preceding are hour or hour:minutes or hours:minutes:seconds). > I again have found for dealing with dumb programs that it is usually > just fine to to extend the second form of date with a dot, ".", and > a twenty four hour clock without the colons, eg. > 900806.161632576 > being > 4:16:32.576 PM 08 Aug 90 6. We are NOT trying for calendar reform. Lojban is novel enough that we don't need to reform the unreformable. However, we do need a single convention in a language to be used for communicating between cultures that do not share a common convention. The 12 vs. 24 hour clock is such an inconsistency. Apparently in non-U.S. environments (as well as the U.S. military), 24-hour clocks are more common than 12 hour clocks. Most people in the U.S. use digital clocks and watches as well. So 'which cycle of the clock' is inherently a biased statement towards preserving an obsolescent and declining system. We have to recognize that it exists, but we do not have to favor it. We also need to be reasonably clear as to what our convention is, though. If you see "900806.161632576" you have no way to even tell it is a date, much less what the convention is for interpreting it. We want to use the shortest form that makes it clear that a convention is being used and whic possibly suggests what that convention is to someone not used to using it. 7. In Arthur's final example, he adds a dot - this again is the Lojban "pi'e" colon. You wouldn't want someone to think it was a decimal point. So don't use one. On the other hand, he does use a decimal point in the seconds of his time in the last line, using a colon for the other separators. So /X H'b# C lojbab