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RE: [lojban] Re: zo xruti xruti

At 10:54 PM 8/11/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> Seriously, I suspect that only things that "don't work" will get through
> the filter to the point of serious change consideration, but documenting
> other gripes in a standard way is a good idea anyway, and one possible
> solution that can be described is to use workaround A, B, or C.
>
> But I feel that a situation where usage is at such deviation with the
> documentation that people would feel the *need* (and not merely the desire) 
> to document two different place structures in a wordlist or dictionary is
> close to the threshold of "seriously broken" given the design
> philosophy.  Unlike the alternate orthographies, I don't think Lojban
> presently has room for more than one place structure for words that is
> official enough to be documented before the language documents change from
> prescriptive to descriptive.

I feel that that change has effectively happened already.
I should note that Nora opposes the xruti change at the moment, so my willingness to consider the change if written up does not mean that lojbab is giving up on the baseline %^). She notes that there are a few other words that have slipped through the agent deletion. fendi, ganzu. In particular she notes that sisti is now agentive, and she believes that it wasn't originally (parallelling cfari), and was made agentive because "usage demanded it". 


It's reasonable
to say that some baselined design feature is seriously broken if nobody
obeys it, but there just doesn't seem much point in altering the baseline
to reflect that; just document usage, and avoid alienating those who
hold the baseline sacrosanct.
If we document usage and at the same time say the prescription is other than usage, then people will wonder which they should use. That really is the only reason I favor making a decision and going one way or the other.
As a comparison, in my draft dictionary changes, I've put a usage note on slabu that people tend to use tolci'o for "old", but this does not make using slabu wrong, just not used as much. Nothing is rendered invalid by this note, so I am confident that it is not a change to the baseline.
A change in place structures deleting a place near the beginning means that, not only are the older usages "wrong", and writings before the change rendered erroneous, but any lujvo made using the word will be misconstructed in its place structure according to dikyjvo conventions. Thus place deletion of an x1 is a BIG change that is best dealt with early. (Has anyone used xruti in a lujvo with a place structure indicating either agentive or non agentive?) 


If you are going to follow place-structure usage in deciding whether it
conflicts with the baseline, I think the most important exercise would
be to check which places never get used (i.e. not even when filled by
an implicit zo'e). That's not an easy task, but that is where the
greatest brokenness is.
At this point, I think that people are still far too malrarna and prone to use only 1 or 2 places by natural language habit to know if nonusage is really a sign of brokenness. In addition, usage is far too skimpy to trust that it will have shown what places are "never used". 

lojbab


--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org