Quantifiers (was Re: A modest proposal #2: verdicality)

["Dylan P. Thurston" <DPT@HUMA1.BITNET>]

mi cusku .o'inai di'e
 > Anyway, IMHO the syntax of sumti needs both rethinking and debugging.
 > From the state of this part of the grammar, I'd guess that it's
 > {puta'e} been patched; I think a rewrite rather than further patching
 > is in order.

That's a bit strong, I think.  Apologies.

Lojban is a beautiful language, with a very unusual structure (for human
languages) and lots of interesting features, yielding new and different
modes of expression.  {pe'i} There are just a few rough spots that
could, well, use a little smoothing (from a rather formal language
design point of view); but on the whole, it's very clean (well-ordered,
compact).  (Much cleaner than any natural language and even some
computer languages, for instance.)

[As an aside, I'd like to point out the use of English politeness rules
in the above paragraph:  I qualified the statements that might cause
offense with {pe'i}.  Politeness rules are a very cultural thing;
Japanese, for instance, has very different rules from English.  We might
want to avoid exporting these same rules to Lojban.

On the other hand, I, for one, might not be able to:  English rules of
politeness are too ingrained in me.]

mu'o mi'e. dilyn.



>From lojbab
To: DPT@HUMA1.BITNET
Subject: Re:  Quantifiers (was Re: A modest proposal #2: verdicality)

I think that the only Lojban rule of politeness is that attitudinals are
to be used honestly - i.e to express actual emotions.  Then if someone
uses a lot of attitudinals, one can read the emotions much as one might
read someone's body language, and the message of the predications may
then become subsidiary to whatever the emotional context is.

At least that is the way I think it will/should work %^).

Much of the language is patched - there was, and still is - a sizable
contingent of the community that considers Lojban to be Loglan, and
certain cvhanges from the original design are thus out of order being
contrary to JCB's original concepts for the language.  I have always
tried to make the language a fulfillment of his concept and not a new
concept in itself.  He may not appreciate this, but it is part of my own
intellectual integrity that I have to do it this way.

In any event, it was decided a few years ago that fiddling had to stop (much less:
> a rewrite rather than further patching
> > is in order.
which might cause a full scale revolt of many long-timers.

lojbab