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[lojban] Re: emotions
At 01:15 PM 5/26/03 -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 10:46:12AM -0400, Robert LeChevalier wrote:
> At 12:48 PM 5/26/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> >It's disyllabic. There is no shortage of bisyllabic cmavo space.
>
> No one has been hurt, so far as I know, by "le du'u"/"le se du'u" and
> "la'edi'u" being longer than one syllable, and I can imagine few things
> that need a shorter one.
Does it fit within the BPFK guidelines to make "lau" mean "la'edi'u"?
Not directly.
It fits within the BPFK guidelines to define lau. Then it fits to decide
that lau is unnecessary and eliminate it. Then it fits to decide to assign
it to something else (and I would not support la'edi'u as a high priority
choice, since the ONLY justification I can imagine for that assignment is
Zipf, to which is counterbalanced the structural clarity of la'eXXXX (which
need not be "di'u", so it also loses the parallelism with la'ede'u, which I
doubt would warrant a parallel monosyllable). More likely, lau would be
used somehow in resolving the gadri semantics problem which seems to bother
more people on purely technical grounds.)
Each of those steps must be justified - you can't eliminate something as
non-useful if you don't know what it means and why it was put in the
language in the first place. And the byfy's job isn't to improve the
language, but to complete the prescription, fixing any bugs in that
prescription that have arisen through usage (which means places where usage
has shown a problem, or where usage has been consistent but at odds with
the intended prescription and thus needs adjudication).
Sure, it's an arbitrary change that has no usage so far,
And arbitrary change is definitely NOT within the byfy charter.
but for one
thing it would be very useful, and for another thing "lau" has never had
any usage anyway, and I can't even imagine what it would be used for.
It was the original solution to the problem that there are more lerfu
symbols and alphabetic characters in the languages of the world, than there
are lojban lerfu, in effect anticipating the Unicode approach of two byte
lerfu, but without nearly as much thought put into it. There ARE better
solutions now that Unicode exists, and usage has chosen other methods for
expressing common lerfu, so the byfy has reason to consider its elimination
as being un-useful (and maybe un-usable BECAUSE it isn't consistent with
the new international standard).
lojbab
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org