[lojban] Re: Baseline statement

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 12:45:00AM +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> Your intent, I take it, is to force the community to pay more
> attention to getting semantics right. I agree, and enough Lojbanists
> do that the BPFK will come into being. If the current state of
> semantic specification were felt to be acceptable, people wouldn't
> want a 'dictionary'; they'd be happy with a pretty-printed version of
> the current wordlists. (Going into the board meeting, that's all I
> thought we'd be doing, actually; the turn has been surprising.) 

Wow.

Pretty-printing the cmavo list and calling that a part of the baseline
is about 50% of the way to what would be require for me to throw my
hands up in disgust and walk away from lojban.

I can't believe it was even under consideration.

> If you want a clausule saying that baseline compliance is not simply a
> matter of running Lojban text through a parser; we also need to make
> sure that the words are used in a standard way, well, sure, that's
> legit. But if anyone out there truly thinks running Lojban text
> through a parser is in itself a proof of baseline compliance, they're
> being doofuses.

<whistling quietly to self whilst walking away>

> This-all is not ex cathedra, because I fear some of you may be such
> doofuses. :-) But it certainly is my opinion, and I'm surprised it's
> controversial. 

I agree with it, actually, despite being guilty of it, because of the
pa/re example.

> 4. Jordan's response (Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 19:10:10 -0600 Subject:
> Re: Comments on the New Policy)
> 
> gismu space is much more open, 

For the record:

There are 48 permissible initial consonant pairs, 5 vowels, and 17
consonants.

This means, unless I'm missing something, that there are 4080 CCVCV
permissible gismu alone, with more than 4080 CVCCV gismu available as
well.

'much more open' is pretty mild.  8)

-Robin

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