Artificial examples (was Re: [bpfk] BPFK work)

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 10:14:18PM -0300, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Robin Lee Powell
> <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 08, 2010 at 09:48:55PM -0300, Jorge Llambías wrote:
> >> Here's a "real" one then:
> >>
> >> <Broca> ienai .i nanca li re po'o
> >
> > heh.  Unhelpful.
> 
> I find it understandable, and just like the one I gave. It means
> "No, (he/she/it) is only two years old/lasted for only two years."
> Broca is obviously not disagreeing with ".i nanca li re po'o".

Sure, I just don't like it because it's not obvious what the {.ie
nai} is intended to point at.

> >> (Although I fail to see how my example is any less real just
> >> because it doesn't come from the corpus. Hopefully you are not
> >> saying that everything in the corpus is good Lojban either.)
> >
> > Oh, I don't care if it comes from the corpus; I care that it
> > resulted from trying to express something for its own sake,
> > rather than trying to come up with an example for BPFK purposes.
> 
> Why on earth would an attempt to express something for its own
> sake be valuable in itself? Most attempts are done by newbies and
> are almost as likely to be fails as to be good Lojban.
> 
> > It's too easy to delude yourself about how the language works if
> > you stick to artificial (in that sense) exaomples.
> 
> We are defining how it works, not observing how it works. If we
> are going to pick examples from usage, we have to first filter
> them to make sure they are used consistently with the definition
> we are prescribing. And we have to pick things that are useful,
> without too much context, for showing how something works. That's
> not always easy to find in usage.

There you go with that "being right" again.  :P  Haven't we gone
over that already?

zo'o

-Robin

-- 
http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/

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