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RE: Lojbab on tu'o (was: RE: RE: Nick on propositionalism &c

I am attempting to maintain my temper.

The only semantics which is baselined is the CLL's.

If the ma'oste prescribes additional semantics, we can choose to allow it or not on the basis of (a) usage, (b) logic, (c) the design principles of Lojban. Among which I count disambiguability.

If the ma'oste contradicts additional semantics, we can choose to allow it or not on the basis of (a) usage, (b) logic, (c) the design principles of Lojban. Among which I count disambiguability.

De jure, Bob is right and And is wrong: a vague zi'o is a legal possible result of any deliberation.

In every other way, Bob is wrong to the point of forcing schism.

cu'u la lojbab.

We have differing ideas as to what is coherent. No one had any question
about the coherence of the definition until you and Jorge tried to use it
for something else. I have little sympathy when you set out to break
things and actually succeed.

This amounts to demanding that noone look at the semantics of CLL too closely, and noone consider the compositional semantics of anything. This is unacceptable.

or (B) what you say is wrong, because
these issues have all been discussed
Frankly I don't give a shit what has been discussed on jboske by 3% of the
Lojban community, while the rest were doing their best to tune out

The jboskeists have much blame for this; but the fact is, these *are* difficult issues, and it is easy to get lost in them, and therefore tune it.

If you think the language can go on without working out a more explicit semantics, and those who tune out of jboske are right to do so, and jboske is not to be considered in any dictionary compilation, then you know what? You already have a dictionary. Why not just publish the ma'oste, like I said, and be done?

If the intent is merely to remove any internal contradictions, and not make the semantics any more explicit, you will get your wish. You want loi to mean all of substance, kind, collective, and all products thereof, with no grammatical means of differentiation? Fine, you'll get it. But I don't find that a Lojban particularly worth defending.

Oh, and take your fingers-in-ears, "lah lah lah I'm not listening" chracterisations of jboske discussion as 'garbage', and... uh, stow them.

I have disdain for the assumption that CLL is the only prescription, and
consider your argument two-faced because you are perfectly willing to throw
out the CLL prescription when your argument requires it. Thus your
claiming scriptural qualities to the document rings hollow to me.

CLL is the only baselined prescription. The ma'oste may have prescribed extra stuff, but I am not bound to retain the extra stuff if I think it violates the design principles of Lojban. Ambiguity does. Vagueness doesn't, and a tu'o vague between zo'e and zi'o would perhaps pass muster. But a tu'o that means zi'o in operand contexts, and zo'e in non-operand contexts? (Because tu'o cannot mean zo'e in operand contexts: the factorial of n with respect to zi'o is defined, the factorial of n with respect to 2 is crap.) I will Occam the combinational semantics of Lojban: a cmavo that means appreciably different things in different contexts is unlearnable. And if there are two proposals, of which one makes a cmavo mean X in context A and Y in context B, and the other makes it mean X throughout, you know which one I'm going to vote for.

But no one wants to use what you are jboskeing. You are creating a work of
art, perhaps an incarnation of your Livagian logical artlang. That isn't
Lojban, which is a language that people will use.

Is it a design principle of Lojban that it be a logical language or isn't it?

I already know that one person is somewhat resentful that
byfy issues are being debated on jboske while the others await a forum that
is worth participating in. jboske isn't, for them.

You know, I don't particularly want to get BPFK started any more. I too have despaired of it coming up with anything. Oh, we can tidy up the inconsistencies, but if we retain the current gadri system completely as it stands, with no addition and no clarification (which is consistent with "just tidying up"), then I will quit Lojban right after.

Furthermore, the contention that jboske isn't the forum is self-deception. What, you think we won't see the selfsame debates with the selfsame people, times four, on a BPFK forum?

But that's just me. I will convene BPFK this week, and ask the list for volunteers to produce voting software, and for a heads-up on the concordancing software.

[Nick Nicholas. French & Italian Studies, University of Melbourne ]
[ nickn@unimelb.edu.au http://www.opoudjis.net ]
[There is no theory of language structure so ill-founded that it cannot]
[be the basis for some successful Machine Translation. --- Yorick Wilks]