Re: [bpfk] BPFK work

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

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".

>> (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.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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