Gaps and Ungaps

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

cu'u la xod

> Two years ago I would have responded with hysterical flamery. Now, I
> agree. When the Leading Lights remain in such fumbling disarray week after
> week over such fundamental concepts, can Lojban be said to have produced
> any emergent consciousness yet? .iseni'ibo .a'o da na'eca zo'onai jeba
> .a'o veldrani le lojbo

Let me be more fundamentalist than xod, which is probably my job. :-) 
There is a lot of Lojban that we get, and that needs to be codified, 
and that has been tried in usage (or at least, usage has decisive 
things to say.)

There are things that were and are a mess, and most people have not 
known what they are doing.

It is in our interest politically to minimise the latter class, if 
community consensus is to be reached. Usage must be maximised. And we 
have learned a lot in the past 10 (or 40) years; we do have a body of 
usage. There is much of Lojban that is clear now, or will be clear 
once the lore is sifted.

However, we will not be able to eliminate the class of underspecified 
and confused Lojban -- which we either get a formulation of now, or 
leave till future generations.

gadri are clearly in such a class.

A lot can be left for future generations (my formula of "the 
formalists, in their own time on their own dime" --- the mathematical 
formalisation of Lojban that a Formalist Academy may issue in 20 
years.) The broad outlines of what the hell Lojban gadri are --- 
cannot wait so long. This needs to be fixed now, so that we can have 
something intelligible to teach on what gadri do. That means working 
out lo'e, loi, and any new gadri and LAhE that will get us by.

We can learn and change -- witness the ka...ce'u sea-change. But we 
need to know what we're talking about.


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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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