Re: concise filling of places

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@quetzal.com>]

>la lojbab. puza cusku di'e
>...
> > I would never promise that all gismu places could be filled concisely.
> > Some are present merely to remind us that their existence should be
> > noted in determining whether a statement is true or not.  Thus you
[...]

.i la dilyn cusku di'e:
>I think I misinterpreted the purpose of the gismu list, then.  Is it
>supposed to be a guide for how you hope the language will actually be
>used?  I thought it was the sort of thing that someone will go back in
>20 years or so and revise based on what people actually use in
>practice; but that's not entirely true if there are places that people
>will never bother to fill.

But you ought to be able to tell from context what sort of thing the hidden
"zo'e" would be.  For example suppose twenty years from now we look at the
body of Lojban text and discover that the x3 of xamgu can almost universally
be filled in by whatever is in the x2 place.

For example, according to the gi'uste you can now say:

  loi stagi cu xamgu le'e verba - vegetables are good for children

or

  loi titla cu xamgu le'e verba - sweets are good to children

The first statement's x3 is implicitly filled by "parents" or "dentists" or
"nutrition" or something, but probably not "le verba".  The second
statement's x3 could possibly be filled by "vy.", in the right context.
[pe'i the assumption that the unspoken "standard" of the statment is filled
by the speakers opinion or socially recognized authority, is malrarna]

If it turned out in 2015 that people always used xamgu the second way, we'd
know the x3 place had disappeared, sucked into the x2 place.  If they used
it both ways we'd know it was still there implicitly, even if it wasn't
explicitly used much.

I suppose another possibility is some religious community could come to have
a lot of linguistic influence among Lojbanists, and maybe "xamgu" would come
to have moral connotations that were restricted to a very particular x3;
i.e. maybe it would become a specialized religious term, like "righteous" or
something, and we'd start using "zabna" for the old, broader meaning of
"xamgu".  Then I think we could conclude that the x3 had disappeared, but
rather than merging with x2 it had become "according to the Koran" or
whatever, and maybe xamgu should even be reglossed.
                     ____
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 Quetzal Consulting   \/   cbogart@quetzal.com