Re: contracts in Lojban

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@quetzal.com>]

>> Actually, I rented an apartment for a couple months in downtown Kukbraun
>> (the capital city of Lojbanistan).  It was interesting reading over the
>> rental agreement because the lojbani lawyers have an unusual style of
>> writing.  They fill in all places, and never use "zo'e".
>
>Do you have a copy, or at least a sample? What do they fill all the
>places with? Every time they use {lo} they multiply the unfilled
>places, because {lo broda} is {lo broda be zo'e bei zo'e bei zo'e...}

Hmm, you're right.  I guess, come to think of it, that that contract wasn't
infinitely long, since I do remember it fitting in a finite file folder.  I
guess they must have just filled in more places than I am accustomed to
seeing, and thereby acheived a greated degree of precision.  But as the
Great Seal of Lojbanisan reads: "the price of infinite precision is infinite
verbosity".

>Also, if the lawyers like to conceptualize things differently, like And
>proposes, then they can have even more fun than in English, where concepts
>are in some sense much more settled already.

The courts have upheld standard conceptualizations which are to be assumed
when reading standard contracts.  Of course, even in Lojbani law there is
eventually a layer of human judgement applied to the interpretation of
things.  But the amount of tortured verbiage necessary to constrain the
range of reasonable human interpretations is somewhat less in Lojban than in
English.

>> (Unfortunately I didn't stay long in Kukbraun; I got fired from the coffee
>> shop I was working at for speaking metaphorically to the customers :-)  )
>
>Was that le ckafybarja by any chance? There were some weird stories published
>here about a guy who worked there, but I think it probably wasn't you.

I doubt it was me, but you shouldn't believe everything you read anyway.
Lojbanis seem particularly prone to talking about alternate universes as if
they were the real one.