From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Fri Jul 20 08:59:50 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 20 Jul 2001 15:59:50 -0000 Received: (qmail 30889 invoked from network); 20 Jul 2001 15:59:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 20 Jul 2001 15:59:18 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO relay3-gui.server.ntli.net) (194.168.4.200) by mta2 with SMTP; 20 Jul 2001 15:59:15 -0000 Received: from m219-mp1-cvx1b.bir.ntl.com ([62.255.40.219] helo=andrew) by relay3-gui.server.ntli.net with smtp (Exim 3.03 #2) id 15NcRF-0005lO-00 for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Fri, 20 Jul 2001 16:43:38 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Editorial comment Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 16:58:20 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <122.1e0073d.288866fa@aol.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 8778 pc: > nicholas@uci.edu writes: [...] > My concern now is that, as is becoming obvious, the ref grammar is still > much too underspecified, so I would contend there is in fact a place for > lessons ranging *beyond* what is covered in there. A language in which > "John and I at least know what it's used for" can be said of *any* of > its constructions (let alone {fa'a}) is still, I'm afraid, not ready for > prime time. The kicker here is, most of these things *can* be cleaned up > and made ready for prime time, without redesign or tinkering, but simply > by someone strapping down the 'oracles' and documenting what has been > used or said on the mailing list (or in camera --- or in the oracles' own > minds.) (Whether this happens in lessons-format or dictionary-format or > reference-grammar-format is not really relevant, as long as it's done.) > I can't say I'm confident that this will happen soon, though, and I won't > be the one to do it anyway. > > While I share Nick's concern that unclarities and even full gaps be taken > care of, I am less sure that they are as many or as bad as he thinks, but am > more sure than he that the way to fix them does not necessarily lie through > Lojban Central, if the aim is to preserve something that can be called a > logical language. LC comes in, I am sure, in preserving the freedom from > syntactic ambiguity, since it contains the master grammar tweaker. But on > the record of the last dozen years or so, the logical side of thing gets > short shrift when compared to any number of other considerations, not > excluding whether LC can figure what is going on after a dozen explanation > attempts. > While I am not sure that the larger community would be more receptive (the > evidence is not favorable, after all), there is more of a chance for logical > maneuvers at least to be heard and tried if presented at large than if kept > in LC. Well Nick does say "documenting what has been used or said on the mailing list". There are some issues (e.g. the meaning of {le} that have been settled (or re-settled) in list discussion in spite of contributions from Central. I think we need to move out of the supplicatory mode of discourse in which, on finding something undefined or unclear in the Refgram, a request is explicity or implicitly addressed to LC asking for a clarification. Instead, the community should try to decide on what the best answer would be, and to document that. For example, to take an example raised by Jorge long ago, does {le (ci) prenu viska vo'a}, does this mean that each person sees each person (A sees A, B, C, B sees A, B, C, etc.) or does it mean that each person sees themself? If left to usage, it will probably end up have both/either of these readings, and hence be logicaly ambiguous. And there's no point asking LC, because there is no existing but undocumented answer. --And. > Now, in fact, most of the issues on hand at the moment are logical only in a > very attentuated sense (do all the tenses fit within a single pattern or are > there several different ones and, if the latter, what are they -- to which > the first answer is pretty clearly that they do not all belong to a single > pattern, but that is because they are not all tenses in the sense originally > intended -- another case where logic lost out to something [God knows what] > else). So the chances of destroying Lojban's vestigial claims to be a logical > language (even the connection with the language of formal logic is pretty > well gone) are slim. But still, I think trusting any decisions about the > language to LC (which is, quite wisely, refusing to take it -- while making > it hard for anyone else to) is not a course likely to lead to a happy result. > > To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.