season's beatings

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

More coal in everyone's stockings:

Doing this extempore rather than answering individual messages for 
now, because I do have a day job.

The BPFK as I signed on to it is what And describes as 
fundamentalist. I reiterate.

What has changed is, we've gone from heavy fundamentalist:

"I have this most excellent solution..."
"Fuck off"

to moderate fundamentalist:

"I have this most excellent solution."
"OK, we're not abandoning our doodoo, but let's see if we can make 
any kludges in our doodoo to be closer to excellence."

(Kludges include extra disambiguating cmavo, extra constraints on 
cmavo meaning. Only in cases of inconsistency does existing CLL 
prescription get discarded.)

What I was hoping to do with these collectives was wedge them on to 
the existing system. Discarding the existing system is indeed 
unacceptable to me. And if you think you're having problems getting 
Jordan to accept the Excellent Solution now, wait till Robin and Jay 
get wind of it.

The backwards compatibility imperative means *sigh* that the 
lojbanmass has to be taken as a basic definitional unit of Lojban, 
not discarded. Ambiguity resolution is a good thing. But to discard 
of Lojbanmass in favour of Substance and Collective breaks 
compatibility. To allow disambiguation between the two, both being 
subclasses of Lojbanmass, doesn't.

At this point, I cease dodging Jordan's point on importing {ro}, and 
take the bullet. I do indeed think it unacceptable that {ro} not be 
disambiguable between importing and exporting. Vague, fine, but 
disambiguable. And back when I was tuned in, I thought {ro su'o no} 
and {ro su'o pa} did the job of disambiguating.

Moreover, there are degrees of sanctity with bits of CLL, just as 
there were with rafsi. When a feature was always poorly understood, 
people may accept a revision (and I believe that's what happened with 
ka...ce'u.) When a feature was always clearly understood, any 
attempt to change it will get lambasted, to say the least.

We all know what individuals are, and that has always been clear. So 
the Excellent Solution's attempt to rearrange {lo} into a Lojbanmass 
(specifically the substance subclass of it) must be rejected. That 
Bob is confused about predicate logic, or always intended a substance 
and never realised it, is neither here nor there.

And the BPFK charter has clearly set a hierarchy (which formalists 
have dismissed as a "mantra") of what backward compatibilities are 
more important than the others. And CLL is uppermost on the list. It 
takes priority over anything Bob has confusedly said, anything he 
intended, the word lists, and usage.

I shall be honest: in my mind, I was thinking that Substance == 
Lojbanmass, and Collective == special case of Lojbanmass. Probably 
not so, fine. The mission then becomes to work out how Substance and 
Collective fit within Lojbanmass. We all accept they are special 
cases of Lojbanmass; the question is, are they special enough to get 
their own gadri or LAhE.

Again: I am happy to lose on the Excellence project, because I'd 
rather keep the language than keep the collective gadri. What I'd 
like is a disambiguation, and I'll trawl the gismu list to see if 
kampu does it, in the first instance.

But yes, this means that the BPFK as I see it cannot be revisionist. 
It is open to fixes, which is a lot more than it used to be; but it 
is, by default, conservative. "By default" does not mean "always". 
But it does mean "by default."

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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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