[lojban-beginners] Re: Single numbers as years

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

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 09:31:54AM -0400, Betsemes wrote:
> In chapter 5 of Lojban for Beginners, this comment is written:
> "More recently there has been a proposal to make single numbers
> refer by default to year rather than day; the controversy on this
> has not settled down yet."

Nick's solution to this is actually pretty obviously the best
possible, but oddly enough still encounters resistance.  :-)  Nick's
proposal is to always use 4 digits for years, and assume that the
date is endian in some fashion (i.e. month/day/year is not allowed).
Then de'i li plus any of the following are all unambiguous (ignoring
the "ambiguity" of not specifying part of the date, which we all
want the option of):

    pa	
    -- "the first"
    pa pi'e re
    -- "the first of February"
    pa pi'e re pi'e pa ki'o
    -- "the first of February of 2000"
    pa ki'o
    -- "the year 2000"
    pa ki'o pi'e ci
    -- "March of the year 2000"
    pa ki'o pi'e ci pi'e vo
    -- "the 4th of March of the year 2000"

> This refers to the construct expressed as "li <number>" which in
> case of dates refers to the day of month. 

There has to be more to the construct than that.  Probably "de'i li
<number>" or something.  "li <number>" is just a sumti, and has no
more intrinsic meaning then writing "5" by itself does in English.

> I guess that this proposal could have some time of having been
> proposed so I want to know what have been decided about this if
> anything. 

No formal committee has looked at the date handling issue.  The BPFK
should probably decide on *something* as a default when we do
{de'i}, though.  "Letting usage decide" aside, this is one of the
single largest source of newbie questions.

> (If my opinion counts and it maybe doesn't; I don't like
> those irregularities in programming languages, much worse is the
> case in human languages. I prefer to use cmene for years).

Umm, huh?  How would you use cmene for years, exactly?  "panononos"?

-Robin

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