From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:45:45 2010 Reply-To: Jorge Llambias Sender: Lojban list Date: Wed Dec 13 15:58:24 1995 From: Jorge Llambias Subject: Re: TECH: PROPOSED GRAMMAR CHANGE X6: Simplification of compound tenses To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, jorge@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Wed Dec 13 15:58:24 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Message-ID: > The problem is two fold. Some people don;t want to have to learn and then > relearn. Extensions don;t hurt them, so long as a) we convince them that > all changes will only be extensions (we've doine this with the gismu list) > and b) that all the extensions will be documented in the refgrammar and > rexrbook so people know what the h*** they are seeing when they are used. > The latter is why new cmavo have to be docuemnted in the refgrammar. And so they should. But if the new cmavo appear after the first edition is published then they won't be documented there. For example, I have little hope that you will introduce the counterpart to {za'o}, (meaning "happening before the natural/expected beginning", or roughly "already"), before publication. That doesn't mean that the need for it will go away. > > I don't remember anyone posting to the list saying that they are > >waiting for the baseline to start learning. > That is because these are the people who either don't join the list in the > first place, or who sign off within a few weeks. It's their loss. If they think that once the grammar is published then the language will exist as a complete language they are deluding themselves. The language won't be anywhere near complete until there are fluent speakers and an abundance of "good quality" text. We do have a good quantity of text now, but would you vouch for its quality? I would not even say that it is all grammatical, much less that it is semantically good. The published grammar can only be a base on which to build. It has no chance of being a complete description. > I don't think any extension will make the language easier to learn. Do you mean that you think no extension will, or that you don't think all extensions will? The ambiguities of "any"... i pau do jinvi le du'u ro nunytcena na clifilri'a le bangu ije'i do jinvi le du'u ro nunytcena naku clifilri'a le bangu ? If you mean that no extension will make it easier then I disagree. If you mean that not all extensions will make it easier then I agree. To disambiguate in English you could have said "I don't think that just any extension..." vs. "I think that no extension..." I suspect you meant the first, with which I agree, but it doesn't really say much. We are not talking about any extension whatsoever, but about a very specific one. > You > are presuming that regularities you see are necessarily regaularities that > everyone else will see and understand in just the way you do. Our continuing > debate over whetheryour proposed ke'/lambda is consistent with the existing > ke'a should convince you otherwise. I simply haven;t the foggiest idea why > you see the two any more rrelated than ke'a and zo'e are. You can look at it this way: ro da pe le ka ke'a klama le zarci Every x associated with the property of going to the store. ro da poi ke'a ckaji le ka ke'a klama le zarci Every x such that it has the property of going to the store. ro da poi ke'a klama le zarci Every x such that it goes to the store. {poi} simply says that you are restricting x to those that have a certain property, and you need ke'a as the dummy argument for the property. {ke'a} is always a dummy argument, in properties by themselves or in the restricting property of {poi}, or in the by-the-way property of {noi}. > >> BTW, on extension vs change. Yes we are more permissive of extensions, > >> but they still have been justified in general by saying thats omething > >> COULD NOT be said, and not that it simply had to be said in a more > >> roundabout way. > >Are you sure? I would bet that most or all of John's changes were > >unjustifiable by that standard. > Well, the new ju'e proposal allows afterthought causals that do not imply > logical connection. Ah! Then my proposals pass that test too. They allow to say things that can be said in forethought but not in afterthought, just like {ju'e}. Methinks you are making up rules as you go. I doubt that you can find a rule that would serve to exclude my proposals and still allow all of John's. > >But the debate had to do with interpretation of what's there. What sort > >of proposal do you expect? > Pc's scope markers. Changes to the default qiantifiers of the various gadri. > Changes to the definition of "re prenu" that affect a dictionay entry > based on such a phrase. Should I bother to write a proposal to have {piro lei} and {pisu'o loi} as default quantifiers? What for, if there was no consensus with pc on that matter? pc is not even convinced that pi-fractionators make sense. As for the scope markers, I certainly will not write any such proposal, since my contention is that you can cope with the current language, that the markers are not a general solution anyway, (at least in the way they were presented), and that they are (at least to me) confusing. > With only Goran as an excpetion, every Lojbanist who has reached any level > of comfort expressing n the language has made some proposal or another for > change. Goran did make a proposal (te'i), but it probably was in Lojban, so you missed it. > >You can have as many tags attached to a selbri as long as you put some > >NAs in between them. I think that should not be allowed, but that would > >be a real change, not an extension, so I will leave it to John to propose > >it. (I don't remember whether he explains this "feature" in the papers.) > > The "feature" is a side effect of the intension for the current rule. Exactly. I want to propose a rule that has no such ill side effects. > REmind me BTW, why it has to be co'a ze'a broda and not ze'a co'a broda. They should both be allowed: "the start of a medium length brodaing" and "the medium length start of a brodaing", respectively. Jorge