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[lojban] Re: selma'o Documentation (or, rewriting the CLL?)



OK, an important question: Are there any copyright or license restrictions in the use of the CLL? Can we just start copying pages from it wholesale into the Wiki, and begin making adjustments to it for readability and currentness?

On Sunday, May 10, 2015 at 1:14:24 PM UTC+8, Spheniscine wrote:
So I faced a problem: One could look up what a cmavo is supposed to mean, and see the selma'o it belongs to. The problem is that there is no current reference as to what the selma'o mean, and its syntax; little things like whether {na'e fetsi mlatu} refers to a cat that is non-female or something that isn't a female cat (turns out, it's the first. To express the second, you need {na'e ke fetsi mlatu [ke'e]}, or {na'e fetsi bo mlatu}). And sure, one could use the ilmentufa parser, but that won't tell you about the little details like the possible different functions of certain selma'o like BO and NAI, depending on position. I also wanted very rough correspondences of certain selma'o to common parts of speech like "prepositions" "articles" etc., which you can't find on a simple search. Of course, I do realize that these correspondences are in fact very rough, and that the selma'o resist any strict classification to those terms, but I wanted there to be at least a starting point.

So then, I brought up the idea of writing a documentation for the selma'o; after some encouragement, I started this wiki page: http://mw.lojban.org/papri/lo_selma%27o_ca%27irvei_(selma%27o_Documentation)

However, I soon ran into a second problem - defining the Lojbanic metalinguistic terms that we keep throwing around, like {selbri}, {sumti}, {tanru}, and of course, {selma'o}. You can see the results of my attempt on that page; I just ended up tying myself in knots defining each term in terms of other terms. This won't quite do; they need to be defined from the ground up, and a mere glossary is not quite sufficient for that.

So then I got to thinking... that's what the CLL is supposed to do, right? {la selpa'i} even pointed out a page in the CLL that has much the same function as my page was meant to be for: http://lojban.github.io/cll/20/

But the problem is that the CLL is fossilized; it has not been updated in years, maybe decades. It does not reflect the various reforms over the years; not the cmevla-brivla merge, not any of the new cmavo or selma'o, not even xorlo. It's also not reflected any changes and tightening in meta-linguistic terminology; it uses {cmene} instead of {cmevla}, for example.

Of course, though, this "new CLL" has to be on the Wiki, and able to be edited to reflect any future reforms; otherwise it's just end up like the current CLL, or Loglan before it. It can't belong to me, to la gleki, to la selpahi, or anyone, but everyone.

{.ie pei doi ro do}

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