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RE: [lojban] Re: emotions



At 09:50 AM 5/26/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Nick to Lojbab:
> > > I can't support a policy of "usage will decide" along with a
> > > policy that promotes non-baseline solutions as being equal to
> > > baseline-compliant solutions
> >
> > Well, you know what I think of your "usage will decide", and how it
> > inherently undermines any baseline..

I first note in answer to Nick that the concept of "usage will decide" was 
intended to apply to selection among multiple options built into the 
language.  This concept has unfortunately been extended to inventing 
non-baseline solutions and hoping that they catch on enough to force a 
change in the baseline.

>Wholly without heat, I observe that I don't understand the
>either of you's rationale. We need a baseline (frozen or not) so
>that we are all (a) speaking the same language & (b) truly speaking
>a language (& not making it up as we go along, pidginwise). But the
>evidence of natural language is that vocabulary innovation is
>the most innocuous and useful variety of usage deciding.

Yes.  And I WANT vocabulary innovation.  But I'd like it to proceed along 
the lines of the design-intent, with a priority on tanru/lujvo for common 
words, Type III fu'ivla for uncommon words, with frequent usage of the 
latter justifying the coining of a Type IV shorter version, and rafsi 
fu'ivla for those concepts that people think deserve a short form from the 
start because they want to sue them in lujvo.

I also think that, while nonce usage will "invent" lots of words, serious 
vocabulary development of a non-nonce type should involve checking how the 
concept is represented in multiple languages including some non-European ones.

>It's
>innocuous because there is scant room for misunderstanding (because
>if a word is novel, there is no competing prior definition for
>it) -- the risk of misunderstanding is much more pernicious
>than the risk of not understanding at all, and useful for obvious
>reasons.

For me, the risk is not one of misunderstanding, but of the establishment 
of bad habits early in the vocabulary development that persist, and in fact 
create problems later.

JCB had the habit in the 70s of coining a new gismu that seemed useful at 
the moment, but which really had no justification as a root word in the 
language.  Thus TLI Loglan has gismu for "olive", "football" (ambiguously 
never defined as to whether he meant this to be soccer or American rugby), 
sodium, beefsteak, and billiards.  All of these should have been lujvo, or 
fu'ivla if there was no obvious lujvo.  But in the 70s, there was no 
distinct fu'ivla form, so borrowings were in the morphological form of 
gismu and lujvo.

I'm fighting the recurrence of this bad habit.

>Furthermore, the value of a baseline (as opposed to
>frozenness) is that it provides some sort of shared explicit
>reference standard. If jbovlaste were used as such, then an
>experimental gismu listed in jbovlaste would be more part of
>the baseline than a lujvo that is not listed.

Indeed.  And it is obvious that jbovlaste will become such a reference 
standard whether it is approved as a "baseline" or not.

>And I don't see any problem with that. Anybody encountering {parji} will 
>either
>know it or not understand it and look it up in jbovlaste, just
>as with any other gismu.

Except that there aren't supposed to be any experimental gismu.  Indeed 
some of them, including the infamous gumri, were explicitly voted out of 
the language by the membership (and I lost on that vote, so that in 
fighting gumri, I fight for a principle over my own preferences for the 
language).

lojbab

-- 
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org



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