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Re: [lojban-beginners] days of the week



n Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 6:43 PM, Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 4:24 PM, xaujbes cindustus
<xaujbes.cindustus@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Is there a standard list for sunday through saturday?

Your answer, as evidenced by this conversation, is clearly NO.  No, no
way, absolutely not, and whatever your suggestion is you can't make
me. :P  Seriously, though, if you're trying to write something in
Lojban, your best chance at being understood is the numbers.  No one
remembers those either, but they can count. :P

It could be discouraging, but another way to look at it is as an
opportunity.  If you want a fully established and decided language,
you have thousands of choices with long, unshakable histories.  Lojban
is one of your very few choices though if you're interested in a
language which both (a) has actual speakers using the language every
day to talk about things and (b) has lots of basic decisions that
haven't been firmly made.  A lot of the people here enjoy being part
of an unsettled, adolescent language.  It's a creative outlet.  That's
what all this bikeshed painting is about.

I think it's fairly harmless.  We'll probably decide somehow
eventually what weekday system is the standard, and then we'll have
something reassuring to tell nintadni.  Meanwhile Lojban is
accumulating a history, a story, a richness that can't easily be
imitated.  For instance, I believe what triggered your question was
someone using {jaurdei} and {mudydei} to make a joke!  Even if having
a bunch of competing and abandoned day naming systems isn't
practically useful, it's a rich soil for humor, for poetry, for
culture.  Lojban is one of the few languages in history to begin as a
simple conlang and grow up into a real full deep human language, and
this seemingly petty conversation is part of that growth.  So try not
to be too frustrated. :)

mi'e la stela selckiku mu'o

I can just imagine, a hundred years from now, some jbove'a tadni will be learning the (finally decided) names of the weekdays, and one of them will ask why are they called /that/, and they get this story of the multiple discussions, debates, suggestions, etc., and then at the end of the story, "and finally, after all the arguing, the then-president Robin Powell said, 'Okay, this is how it's going to be, all of you shut up:...', and that was that." zo'o

--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.a'o.e'e ko cmima le bende pe lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

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