Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Mark on wiki on lerfu

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2001 03:23:52 -0400

At 07:51 PM 9/8/01 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
It is nice to ahve all these tools available for choices,
>but we do not need them to do the work (we don't even need the fo'V set,
>rpobably, as witness there heavy use so far.)

It is not a question of need, but rather of usefulness. By having the 
lerfu, we have a mnemonic method for people who find that advantageous (but 
if I needed anaphors for Dave and Dan (not to mention djan) the lerfu 
solution is more pragmatically difficult. The ko'a and fo'a series are 
useful for assigning because they do NOT imply a mnemonic and you EXPECT 
them to be explicitly assigned. The existence of two series of ko'a/fo'a 
allows one to arbitrarily establish two groups based on first letter, and 
some larger number of groups based on final vowel or on subscripting (lerfu 
of course give 17 groups, leading to Cowan's claim that Lojban is the only 
language with 17 genders. Gender (the non-grammatical kind) of course is 
one reason for being able to group anaphors. You could have a convention 
that ko'V is used for males and fo'V for females, or in a dispute use 
members of each series to represent different camps ("them", and "the 
others"). I vaguely recall that Athelstan may have used both series in his 
translation of Saki's _The Open Window_ but I can't recall the specifics.

The point being that we put in lots of approaches to allow people to use 
whatever approach suits their purpose, in particular recognizing that 
choice of how to anaphorize might have preferences determined by native 
language. Since JCB put all these methods into the language in some form 
or another (his ba is our da, his da is our ko'a, he has backcounting 
anaphora, and he has lerfu anaphora as well), I saw no reason to reject any 
of them in designing Lojban.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org