To: The Lojban List <lojban@egroups.com>
In-Reply-To: <391BEEEA.4ADF@math.bas.bg>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0005120918050.297-100000@simba.math.ucla.edu>
From: "James F. Carter" <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>
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Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 09:43:14 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component
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On Fri, 12 May 2000, Ivan A Derzhanski wrote:

> ...
> Today is a day of 2000 -- to be more precise, it is a
> May-ish [day of 2000] -- to be even more precise, it is
> a [12th-of-the-month]-type_of a [May-ish [day of 2000]].
> Looks perfectly tanru-like to me.

To me this is the most convincing analysis of the date-as-tanru so far.
However, I'm still more attracted to the date as a number, specifically,
a highly irregular mixed radix megadigit number.  

Jorge (I think it was) wrote convincingly that in most cases, and with
proper care with Y2K issues, context could determine whether the year was
present, so the only ambiguity was whether we were going to use the order
mm,dd (my preference, and per ISO 8601) or dd,mm.  Obviously, and
conformant to ISO 8601, if only a single component is present it is the
day.  There is still the ambiguity between the date and the time, i.e.
mm,dd (or dd,mm) vs. HH,MM, but none of what we're talking about can cure
that problem.

Speaking legally, I think we have these issues:

1.  There is an applicable standard, ISO 8601.
2.  It isn't being ignored, even in the USA, at least among geeks.
3.  Lojban in fact lacks a baselined semantic prescription for dates.
4.  The standard works in Lojban.  (The mandatory hyphen separators are
    out; we would use pi'e I believe; but the big-end ordering will work.)
5.  Therefore we ought to use it, or perhaps more strictly legal and in
    line with what Jorge has been writing, we ought to popularize it, and 
6.  The little-end ordering is literally malglico.

James F. Carter        Voice 310 825 2897	FAX 310 206 6673
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