[lojban-beginners] Re: Up-to-date definition of Lojban

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

Robin, I'd appreciate not being lightly accused of deception. I know
you probably don't really mean it, I know you sometimes use much
stronger words than what you mean, but still... Anyway, before we
let this escalate any further, it might be useful to describe what
brought up Yannis's question. It had nothing to do with xorlo. He
proposed the following sentence:

  The rocket is flying upwards.
   le jakne cu ga'u vofli

I commented: "Upwards" would be {ga'u mo'i}.

(I now notice that I should have said {mo'i ga'u}, because
{mo'i} modifies what follows rather than what preceeds).

I didn't check what was official or what wasn't when I made that
comment, I just commented based on my working knowledge of
the language. I even made a mistake in my correction!

He then challenged my comment (which is a very healthy thing
to do, there is no reason to accept a correction just because
somone who is more experienced with the language has made it)
by citing the ma'oste:

ga'u      FAhA2    above
location tense relation/direction; upwards/up from ...

I didn't even remember this definition from the ma'oste, I just knew
that {ga'u} is meant to be a location, not a direction. So I checked
with CLL and confirmed that there the location and direction
meanings are clearly separated. I told Yannis that the ma'oste is
not always 100% reliable and pointed him to the corresponding
chapter in CLL. I didn't say anything about officialness, because
I don't really give as much value as others to what's official or what's
not, but in this case it just happens that CLL is "more official" than
the ma'oste.

Now, I aways try to be careful when commenting on someone else's
use of the language to separate what is clearly and uncontroversially
an error (a missing {cu}, an impermissible consonant cluster, etc)
from what is my preferred usage. In the latter case, I normally say
things like "that's not necessarily wrong, but I would prefer such and
such", or "I would say it like this instead of like that", or "I prefer to use
this word in this other way" etc. I never just say that something is wrong
when I know there is a controversy.

The BPFK stuff is not official yet, maybe some parts of it will never become
official. But 95% of it agrees with the official definitions and is often
more clear and better defined, so hiding it from "beginners" or making it
seem as if it is something very suspect and that you shouldn't look at
is not, in my opinion, a good policy. All the definition pages have the
heading "Proposed definition" so it is not as if anyone would be misled
into thinking it is the last word on anything. In fact we need more people
to look at it and comment as much as possible, and we are all beginners
in some sense, so being a beginner should not keep anyone interested
from looking into it.

mu'o mi'e xorxes