Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 27 Aug 1993 17:59:36 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Fri, 27 Aug 1993 17:59:29 -0400 Message-Id: <199308272159.AA00690@eli.CS.YALE.EDU> Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0616; Fri, 27 Aug 93 17:58:02 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 1741; Fri, 27 Aug 93 18:00:49 EDT Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 17:57:08 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: TECH: QUERY on ZI & ZEhA X-To: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Fri Aug 27 13:57:08 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET CF> > But this is not a form of expression which I have ever felt the CF> > need for. CF> CF> Even if that is true, there are many grammatical expressions which CF> will probably never be needed. Is this a reason to give them a CF> more useful meaning, by introducing a special interpretation rule? CF> In your response to Colin above (sorry about the weird quotes): it has long been my bias that indeed, IF there is something sayable in Lojban, THEN people will want to assign a meaning to it. This indeed has been one of the fun Loglan/Lojban games for a couple of decades now. The converse is also true: if there is something useful to say and there is an idle grammatical structure sitting around, people are prone to want to use it. I think that this is true in natlangs as well, and may be a major source of language evolution. From a conlang design perspective, at least for one like Lojban, being efficient in the use of language structures means a smaller set of words and grammatical structures to memorize. WE have stretched "bo" a long way, for example. lojbab