RE: [lojban] Re: emotions

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Nick to Lojbab:
> > I can't support a policy of "usage will decide" along with a
> > policy that promotes non-baseline solutions as being equal to
> > baseline-compliant solutions 
> 
> Well, you know what I think of your "usage will decide", and how it 
> inherently undermines any baseline.. 

Wholly without heat, I observe that I don't understand the 
either of you's rationale. We need a baseline (frozen or not) so 
that we are all (a) speaking the same language & (b) truly speaking 
a language (& not making it up as we go along, pidginwise). But the
evidence of natural language is that vocabulary innovation is
the most innocuous and useful variety of usage deciding. It's
innocuous because there is scant room for misunderstanding (because
if a word is novel, there is no competing prior definition for
it) -- the risk of misunderstanding is much more pernicious
than the risk of not understanding at all, and useful for obvious 
reasons. Furthermore, the value of a baseline (as opposed to 
frozenness) is that it provides some sort of shared explicit 
reference standard. If jbovlaste were used as such, then an
experimental gismu listed in jbovlaste would be more part of
the baseline than a lujvo that is not listed. And I don't see 
any problem with that. Anybody encountering {parji} will either
know it or not understand it and look it up in jbovlaste, just
as with any other gismu.

--And.