In a message dated 9/14/2001 6:19:36 PM Central Daylight Time, rob@twcny.rr.com writes:
Nice flame. Thanks! Not too subtle apparently. <> What new has been discovered about PA and where are these > discoveries published? A while ago Xorxes made an informal grammar of PA cmavo, which was part of a thread about what PA in various combinations meant. It seemed to meet with general approval. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/5817) Of course, I suppose it might not _really_ be part of Lojban history, because you didn't get to bless it with one of your sacred Records.> Thank you for the address. Records are for either significant discussion or reported agreement on questions. I am running way behind on them because I tend to get caught up in some of the arguments and skip others. I alos lost a pile of email when either Yahoo or aol redid something. But, in any case, I don't see xorxes opinions as being either in a running discussion nor a consesnsu answer to a question, so I don't see that they need a record -- yet. <In the first go-round of the date argument, I saw nobody mentioning {no'o} or {tu'o} or any such number, except in a digression about specifying centuries. They just weren't used then. There weren't enough examples of using them, and so using them was scary.> I don't know what was your first date discussion. Mine was in 1977, I think. But so far, you are right -- no {no'o} or {tu'o} has turned up -- I can't even find it in the centuries part. So, they do provide some handy devices for the future, but don't seem to change the basic issue at all: I know what to put in for day and month if I just want to talk about year, for example. <You seem to be unfamiliar with the concept of a mixed base. I refer you to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/2716.> Thanks for the reference; it is good to have a check that I had my concepts right according to you (I assume). <day month year = A B C C is the units digit. It goes from negative infinity to positive infinity - which is a strange thing for a units digit to do. B is the 1/12ths place. Its digit ranges from 1 to 12. A is the 1/365ths place. Its digit ranges from 1 to 28-31.> Well, you can put it that way if you want, though it looks peculiar. Why not say that A is the units, B the roughly 30s and C 12, which go on because we don't have bigger values. Or say A is day, B is month and C is year, which does the whole rather more clearly (though requires a bit of outside knowledge, which we all have). <You say I got the bases wrong and I carried wrong. I did neither; what I did was to write the date wrong (day pi'e month pi'e year) and try to take it to its logical conclusion. I apologize for being unclear in doing so.> Well, you got the date right, then misgeneralized an arithmetic procedure -- carry goes left only if you are adding from the right: if adding from the left, carry goes right. Now, you do have to know which way you are working, but I thought -- since you were objecting to it -- that you did. So you did not succeed in carrying anything to its logical conclusion; you just messed up an elementary calculation. Admittedly, {pi'e} doesn't tell you what is weird, only that something is. But, as I said, I thought you knew what it was. <In day-month-year, how do you refer to an event happening during a certain year? It seems you don't. The lessons avoid this by naming years. So this year is {la renonopananc.} and the next year is {la renonorenanc.} and the next year is {la djimbab.}, or might as well be, because cmene are not analyzable.> Well, in the ccyymmdd version, how do you refer to an event happening on a certain day? Presumably the same trick, whichever of the several available you like, will work for the year in the ddmmccyy version. Take your pick, even use {la PAdjed}, if you want (though I agree that that is inelegant). And the whole point is that we are much more likely to want to talk about a day in this month than a year all by itself, so we make the more common one easier to say. <How do you tell me that {la kristoBAL. koLON. pu falnu litru le xasmi co blanu} in 1492, and not during the lifespan of some guy named Pavoso Renanc?> Well, {Pavoso Renanc} isn't someone's (or something's) name for starters. And even if it were, {ca la ...} wouldn't mean "during the lifetime of " (though {ca tu'a la...} just might). Actually, {ca li pavosore} would work pretty well, at least at a glorking level, since it can't be a day or a month or any otehr standard time thingy and {ca} calls for a number that is a time event. The harder on is to tell that something takes place this October. |