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Re: [lojban] Re: emotions

At 01:15 PM 5/26/03 -0400, Rob Speer wrote: 
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 10:46:12AM -0400, Robert LeChevalier wrote:
> At 12:48 PM 5/26/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> >It's disyllabic. There is no shortage of bisyllabic cmavo space.
>
> No one has been hurt, so far as I know, by "le du'u"/"le se du'u" and
> "la'edi'u" being longer than one syllable, and I can imagine few things
> that need a shorter one.

Does it fit within the BPFK guidelines to make "lau" mean "la'edi'u"?

Not directly.

It fits within the BPFK guidelines to define lau. Then it fits to decide that lau is unnecessary and eliminate it. Then it fits to decide to assign it to something else (and I would not support la'edi'u as a high priority choice, since the ONLY justification I can imagine for that assignment is Zipf, to which is counterbalanced the structural clarity of la'eXXXX (which need not be "di'u", so it also loses the parallelism with la'ede'u, which I doubt would warrant a parallel monosyllable). More likely, lau would be used somehow in resolving the gadri semantics problem which seems to bother more people on purely technical grounds.)

Each of those steps must be justified - you can't eliminate something as non-useful if you don't know what it means and why it was put in the language in the first place. And the byfy's job isn't to improve the language, but to complete the prescription, fixing any bugs in that prescription that have arisen through usage (which means places where usage has shown a problem, or where usage has been consistent but at odds with the intended prescription and thus needs adjudication).

Sure, it's an arbitrary change that has no usage so far,

And arbitrary change is definitely NOT within the byfy charter.

 but for one
thing it would be very useful, and for another thing "lau" has never had
any usage anyway, and I can't even imagine what it would be used for.

It was the original solution to the problem that there are more lerfu symbols and alphabetic characters in the languages of the world, than there are lojban lerfu, in effect anticipating the Unicode approach of two byte lerfu, but without nearly as much thought put into it. There ARE better solutions now that Unicode exists, and usage has chosen other methods for expressing common lerfu, so the byfy has reason to consider its elimination as being un-useful (and maybe un-usable BECAUSE it isn't consistent with the new international standard).

lojbab

--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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