To: lojban@yahoogroups.com
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Subject: hardlinerism and other categories
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 21:24:36 
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From: "Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>
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la nitcion cusku di'e

>In the attitude to Lojban I will conventionally characterise as
>'naturalistic', it is objected that 'hardliner' insistence on rigour
>(particularly semantic rigour) places unwelcome constraints on creativity.

If I may, I would like to open this one-dimensional categorization
into a two-dimensional one. Let's consider two "rigor axes":
semantic rigor and baseline rigor. We now have four groups, which
I will arbitrarily designate as Lojbab, Xod, And, and Xorxes.

Lojbab wants absolute baseline rigor, and is not overly concerned
about semantic rigor. As long as it doesn't violate the baseline,
anything goes, and if you have to do a triple somersault in the
air in order to make sense of some baseline rule, then so be it,
but the rule stands.

Xod doesn't care about either rigor in particular. The point of
the language is to communicate, and anything that facilitates
communication is acceptable, whether that means taking liberties
with the baseline or with strict semantics.

And wants semantic rigor to be matched by baseline rigor, so
whenever the baseline does not make sense it should be officially
fixed.

Xorxes cares most about semantic rigor, but doesn't give much of
a hoot about the baseline.

As it can be seen, Xorxes' position is diametrically opposite to
Lojbab's, which explains why they disagree on just about everything,
and whenever they find themselves agreeing about something they
suspect that they must be misunderstanding each other.

Xorxes has an affinity with And in wanting maximum semantic
rigor, and an affinity with Xod in giving more importance to
the use of the language than to whatever rules are deemed
official.

Nick falls in all four categories: His usage tends to be
naturalistic (Xod), he wants to fix the baseline where it
is shown to be broken (And), in his heart he shares some
of Lojbab's terror at touching the baseline, but in his
mind he knows that Xorxes is right... :)

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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