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Re: [bpfk] BPFK work - getting it done.



Jonathan Jones wrote:
 >  From the cmavo list at
http://www.lojban.org/publications/wordlists/cmavo_selmaho_order.txt:

    baba - PU* - will be going to - time tense: will be going to;
    (tense/modal)


Personally, I'm in agreement with you. But I'm working on describing the unfinished cmavo entries in the BPFK sections, this is one of the entries, and that's it's official definition, stupid as it is.

I would like to at this time seek approval for removing the following entries from the BPFK Section: Tense <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BPFK+Section%3A+Tense> page:

{baba}¹
{bapu}¹
{puba}¹
{pupu}¹

At the time these were added, they were the best Lojban equivalents of certain aspects. We later added another set of cmavo that solved the problem in a different way, but it was not clear that the two systems were totally redundant. This was before the "Imaginary Journeys paradigm" was invented.

{baca'a}²
{caca'a}²
{cajeba}²
{puca'a}²
{pujeba}²
{pujeca}²
{puza}²
{puze'a}²
{puze'i}²
{puze'u}²
{puzi}²
{puzu}²

These and many other compounds were added to the cmavo list to show how cmavo could be used in combination within the grammar, and incidentally to provide Lojban equivalents for certain English usages and expressions.

There was no CLL at the time, and most Lojbanists did not learn or understand the grammar from the YACC or EBNF formats, but from these sorts of compounds being present in the cmavo list, with translations.

¹ Official meaning differs from usage.

If these differ, it should be relatively easy to demonstrate this, and show what they SHOULD mean. Eliminating them is a change (to the cmavo list which is a baseline document), and needs to be justified.

I suspect that I will agree with you that either they shouldn't be kept, or that their meaning needs to be changed/clarified.

>as well as being non-intuitive

One would want any non-intuitive compounds to be explicitly documented.

² Meaning is obvious given meaning of components and therefore does not need it's own entry.

Possible true for someone with a thorough understanding of the components and how they work together. But such understanding isn't something that should be presumed of the typical user of the books and wordlists. Lots of examples are good!

Equally important, again, is that there is an English-to-Lojban direction for a dictionary or word list, and not just a Lojban-to-English direction. (Replace English by any other language as desired.) That we usually look at wordlists in Lojban-to-English order doesn't reflect that they were designed for use in both directions.

(Given the difference in the various natural languages, different natural languages would probably warrant different compounds being shown in their respective bilingual lists.)

In my own half-completed definition of "pu" I was planning on including those (pu) compounds that had indeed seen usage in the corpus (some of which are not in the cmavo list), and then arguing for elimination of the rest as not necessary for pedagogical or usage reasons.

lojbab




--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.a'o.e'e ko cmima le bende pe lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

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