RE: RE: Re[2]: [lojban] Dr. James Cooke Brown

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@pmail.net>]

From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@pmail.net>

> From: Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@apocalypse.org>
>
> At 02:23 PM 2/18/00 -0500, you wrote:
> From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>
>
> >Incidentally, the latter discussion points out the one problem with the
> >"hoa" and "xo'a" introducers of the other language/dialect - while the two
> >words look different in print, in speech they would likely be heard as the
> >same word in either version, and thus be ineffective at indicating a change
> >in dialect.  Indeed, in our alternate orthography originally established to
> >make rapprochement based on Lojban more attractive to the TLI Loglan
> >community, the alternate orthography form of "xo'a" is exactly "hoa".
> >
> >lojbab
>
> Why, Bob? Couldn't one treat them as _toggles_ rather than as indicators of
> a particular language? In other words, whenever you hear hoa/xo'a, you
> switch to the other dialect. IMHO, this would only be a problem if
>
> 1) Your listener did not already know which dialect you were speaking
> (unlikely), or
>
> 2) There were more than two dialects of Loglan/Lojban.

(2) is not on the cards. (1) would apply at the start of a text, and,
Lojbab seems to be suggesting. occasionally in the middle. I can think
of 3 solutions.

1. Give hoa/xo'a an optional argument, which would specify the language. But
that would complicate the grammar considerably.

2. Find a different existing word in each 'dialect' that would bind
syntactically to the hoa/xo'a but have semantically innocuous effects.
On cursory examination of this option, I can't spot any candidate words,
and I suspect it's a nonstarter.

3. Find an additional Little Word doublet that is unassigned in both
dialects. Rather than having toggle functions, then, one doublet would introduce
Lojban mode and the other would introduce classical mode.
This option seems the most hassle-free, but I don't have the relevant
wordlists available to assess its viability.

--And.


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