Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

A Rosta wrote:

> Where there's a will there's a way.

Hear, hear.

> For starters, the two lexicogrammars
> could be discrete subcomponents of a single macrogrammar, so that by
> choosing some appropriate lexical indicator at the start of the text
> one could indicate whether one were writing Loglan in classical or Lojban
> mode.

A possible candidate would be the little-word "hoa", which is not
currently defined in Loglan (or not in the posted version of L1, anyhow).
This would mean "What follows is Lojban".  The corresponding Lojban
cmavo, "xo'a" (pronounced about the same way) has already been explicitly
reserved for experimental use, like all little-words beginning with "x".
For those subscribing to this convention, it would mean "What follows
is classical Loglan".  Nicely, the vowels "oa" appear in "Loglan" and
"Lojban".  For example:

	xo'a I cao eo djupo la Lojban!
	hoa .i .e'osai ko sarji la loglan.

(Translation notes:  There seems to be no equivalent of "sai" in
classical Loglan, so I have used "cao", which is like Lojban "ba'e".
The "ko" in the Lojban version means "you" but also marks the
sentence as imperative: mere omission of the x1 argument does not make
not an imperative in Lojban.)

> A stage beyond that would be to define word-for-word equivalences
> between the Lojban and classical Loglan lexicons.

This will happen: the technical information is in LLG's hands, and
the necessary permissions are being sought even as we speak.  In some
cases, word-for-wordness cannot be readily achieved, because etymologically
corresponding gismu/prims have evolved to different place structures.
Cleverly created complexes/lujvo could solve this problem.

> >From that point on, usage would decide the eventual outcome, given the
> tendency of most people to emulate the language of their peers.

"Let usage decide": a slogan of the Unified Loglan Project.  (By talking
about "unified Europe", people made it so.  I aim to do the same.)

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
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Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)