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Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 18:54:58 EDT
Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page
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In a message dated 5/8/00 1:32:47 PM CST, phm@A2E.DE writes:

<< 
 > << The structure of lojban tanru is like yyyy-mm-dd:  central part in the
 >  end, delimiting peripherals prepended (or elided) as far as necessitated
 >  by the context.>>
 ...
 >    In short, this particular analogy does not seem to be decisive, since 
it 
 > can be made to cut either way (though I think the dmy version is more 
 > plausible).
 
 This is more than an analogy.>>
It's not clear what "more" means here;  it is certainly an analogy, since 
dates aren't tanru or any other structure of predicates but sumti of some 
sort,  and some similarity is being pointed to.
 
 <<>  <<The ddmmyy structure comes from latin and other west-european 
languages,
 >  where the composites are built using the genitive (or English 'of'):
 >  central part in the beginning, delimiting peripherals appended (or
 >  elided).
 ... 
 > While I will buy the historical claim, the move to Lojban -- and the move 
 > within Lojban -- make no sense to me at all, quite aside from the issue of 
 > what all this has to do with tanru.
 
 And it is more than historical.>>
Again, what more?  Only history is rehearsed here.
 
 <<The sequence is determined by how the particular language builds a
 composite group (tanru).>>
The sequence of items in a date?  Why are only tanru groups -- predicates 
--significant?  I should have thought -- and your examples suggest -- that 
sumti groups are more important as more like dates.
 
 <<When I say "I will go on the 20th" and you ask "20th of what?", I may
 answer "20th of June".  If that is not clear enough, you again will ask
 "20th of June of which year" and I will answer "20th of June of 2000">>
Well, being cheap I would probably just say "June" and "2000," but I probably 
wouldn't have said just "the 20th" unless I was pretty sure my interlocutor 
had the rest right.  I am a good Gricean, in principle, at least.
 
 <<In Chinese the expansion goes the other way around.  English, especially
 American English, has word groups like "NBC's Walter Cronkyte" which
 expand at the beginning like Chinese or Lojban.  Likewise, "The year
 2000's June's 20th day" is possible, and "June 20th" is normal. This is, I
 suspect, a reason why 2000-06-05 is becoming popular in the US more than
 in Western Europe.>>
Worse things than that are possible in American (and no only) English but 
that does not mean that they occur, though "June 20th" really is normal.  But 
I've lost the point here, this is not the position you are advocating nor the 
lojbanic norm (prescriptive ut nunc) so where does it fit in?
  
 <<There are other examples of silly centrifugal order in German, e.g. "S 828
 BGB", which is just an abbreviation for something like "Section 828 of the
 Civil Law".  Nobody can argue that it suits human thinking well to first
 dive down into a section and then look up and see what body of law we are
 talking about.  There is no deeper meaning to these language conventions.
 They are just habits that evolved out of the language's grammer pattern
 and were never questioned, no matter how unpractical the results were.>>
Why is this centrifugal rather than centripetal, the analogy behind these 
words is not clear, since the distance seems the same and only the direction 
is different.  The civil code case seems exactly like the oardinary lojban 
tanru, restriction to broader, with the broader capable of being dropped in 
context.
 
 <<One can also compare this to some bad conventions used for writing musical
 scores in medieval times or in pre-westernisation China.  Thise scores
 were closely tied to language habits and had not emancipated themselves
 from them.>>
I rally don't see the relevance or usefulness of this; can you give an 
example of such a notation and how it bears on the order of dates in Lojban 
-- or even on the structure of the underlying language (assuming that may be 
relevant to the date question).
 
 > It is good to see that we agree (I think) about what a single number in 
the 
 > date slot means (day); we disagree how most lojbanically to get there from 
a 
 > full date.
 
 <<Lojban, as a language with a centripetal tanru expansion/elision pattern
 is, like Chinese, in the lucky situation that good (temporal and spacial)
 positioning abbreviations are likely to evolve from it.  If we let it
 happen.>>
Again, the distance from year to day is the same as that from day to year and 
it is the year end of things that is going to get elided or added on as 
needed.  Generally the pattern in lojban is to put the stuff that can be left 
off contextually to the right.  Looks like dmy again to me.