Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla

[selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de>]

la .remos. cu cusku di'e
> While I'd be in favor of the Merge, last time someone objected that it
> would break some as simple as {la lojban mo}.

But what's so great about that sentence, and does it outweigh the 
possible benefits?

> It would probably break a lot of the existing text. I would still like
> to see it accepted but it seems a major change and we should be prepared
> to review and change the documents or we'll get major confusion (much
> greater than xorlo).

It is important to note that some authors have been writing their texts 
in such a way that, if read with cmevla as brivla, the text does not 
parse differently. Simply said, this means always using {cu} between a 
cmevla and the following selbri. xorxes does this (probably not by 
accident), and I do, too.

Our current Lojban corpus contains 150,000 (rounded up) words (excluding 
IRC). If we take all of xorxes' major texts and add them together, we get

  Alice 33,000
+ The Little Prince 17,000
+ Metamorphosis 26,000
= 76,000 words.

+ my ~50,000 words

we arrive at 126,000 words, which constitute 84% of the entire corpus, 
and which don't need any changes if the Merge goes through.

I didn't have time to count all the smaller texts and check what would 
happen to them, but chances are there are a few more that wouldn't be 
affected. On top of that, all the future additions would already 
incorporate the change, and would quickly outnumber the old texts.

All this aside, however, I don't think it would be such a problem even 
if it affected a large fraction of the corpus and if nobody went ahead 
and updated them. Why? Because if you know that a text is old (that is, 
from pre-Merge times), you can simply read it with the old rules in 
mind. It's not difficult to understand outdated material as long as you 
are aware that the rules were different back then.

mu'o mi'e la selpa'i


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