My reading of the situation is:
1) newer lojbanists seem to know how to not be grammatically wrong
2) more experienced lojbanists seem not to be too concerned with homogenization
3) the number of currently contributing lojbanists is pretty small
...so, I'll take a poll, but I think that Ross's "let usage decide" rule might just make most sense.
On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 09:17, Remo Dentato
<rdentato@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm a little bit confused as I don't really see how the "dialects"
aspect is a problem.
I do expect that different people would say thing differently. I might
say {le mlatu cu klama} and someone else could say {le mlatu ku klama}
and that's perfectly right.
Each contributor of Tatoeba will add the sentences as he/she see fit.
Since there can be more than one translation for a sentence I don't
see a problem if both are entered.
So, to me, the principle should be that the sentence we add to tatoeba
is one that *someone of us* would say. In other words, it shouldn't be
too convoluted. This means to me that we *should not* add a sentence
with all the elidable terminators just for the sake of doing it.
As for the initial {.i} I'm still of the idea that we shouldn't put it.
It seems odd to me that the translation of "the cat goes" would be
{ni'o le mlatu cu klama fa'o} or {.i le mlatu cu klama}.
The {ni'o}, {fa'o} and {.i} presence depends on the position of the
sentence in a larger text, not on the translation itself.
Do you think we should set a doodle poll to record the preferences?
Remo
--
Oren Robinson
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Somerville, MA 02144