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Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update
With the gimste revision hopefully about to begin, I'd like to introduce
you to some goals of this project as well as present a simple outline of
how I hope we're going to accomplish those goals.
For ease of learning and for aesthetic reasons the gimste should be
1. As interally consistent as possible
2. As simple as possible
Lojban is marketed as "simple and easy to learn". The gimste contains
certain elements which seem to contradict that claim, as lots of gismu
are bloated, and lots of gismu contain surprising and irregular sumti
places.
The simpler and the more consistent the gimste, the higher are the
chances for the average person to learn Lojban and the more pleasant it
is to be a user of this language, I believe.
The gimste should also be expressive, but not at the cost of cramming in
countless places just for the sake of having more places per gismu.
That's not something that adds expressiveness.
The gimste revision can be divided in two parts:
1) Global proposals and considerations
2) Individual gismu poposals
Global proposals are those that pertain to the whole gimste as a whole.
This is where general questions, such as "should we remove the "under
conditions" places?" are discussed. Anything that can be applied to
multiple gismu at once falls under this category. This has the advantage
that we don't have to discuss the same things again and again for each
gismu we consider.
Individual gismu proposals then look at each gismu individually. Here,
the special characteristics of each gismu can be analyzed. Superfluous
or irregular places can be adjusted or removed and missing places can be
added. Examples of likely-superfluous places would be the x3 of {tirxu}
or the completely unweildy definition of {santa}.
The point of this revision is, again, to make the gimste internally
consistent and thus easier to learn for newcomers as well as easier to
use for people already reasonably fluent.
For the second step it makes sense to proceed not in alphabetical order
but by semantic groupings. That way it becomes much easier to get
related gismu to align. For example, all the gismu about emotional
states could go together. We have a few such gismu categorizations we
can use as a basis.
As part of the revision, I would also like to define each gismu well
enough that we can come up with examples filling *every* sumti place of
every gismu. Currently there are certain sumti places which nobody
really knows how to fill. If we can't fill a place or don't understand
it, it has no reason to exist, so we should either figure out what it
means and how it's used or remove it. At the end of all this, we will
have a shiny list of gismu, along with plenty of example sentences that
anyone having questions about how to use a certain gismu can simply look
up and learn from. It is my belief that this will be an invaluable aid
for learners and that the project as a whole will increase Lojban's
attractiveness. (afterall, one of its advertised selling points is that
it is free of exceptions, and I don't think we should lie to people)
Concerning how to get involved:
As I respect people's preference of email over anything else (I myself
love mailing lists more than I can say), I will make sure that the list
is informed of current discussions and has a chance to be involved
without using the github interface. Those who do want to use it can
follow this link to learn how to use it for this project (it's not
*that* difficult):
https://github.com/balningau/gimste/blob/master/docs/SUBMISSIONS.md
As la durka said, you can also subscribe to the repository just like you
would to a mailing list and you will then get email for all the
discussions happening on github, so you won't miss a thing and won't
ever have to use the website except once to subscribe.
This is the rough outline of what I'd like us to do. Comments are welcome.
Thank you.
mi'e la selpa'i mu'o
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