Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: periodic hexadecimal reminder

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2001 22:11:56 -0400

At 07:41 PM 10/2/01 +0000, [email-masked] wrote:
>There is one other mechanism I would like to see considered:
>a way to assign a sticky base, so that one could define a
>base at the beginning of a document or section, and have
>the later numbers interpreted as the base in question.
>Since, this wouldn't be a common operation, I don't think
>that a cmavo needs to be assigned for that purpose.

There already is one. You can make all manner of metalinguistic sentences 
anywhere in Lojban text using ti'o/sei+bridi-tail. You can unambiguously 
set scope larger than a single sentence by enclosing the scoped text in 
tu'e/tu'u brackets, and appending the ti'o/sei construct to the tu'e. In 
this event it acts kinda as a footnote to the scoped text.

>The most radical part of my suggestion is creating a new
>cmavo for use in ju'i to indicate base sixteen.

Since Lojban usage has not in fact used ju'i much with *any* base values, 
it is hard to justify adding more cmavo. The proper way to do this is to 
establish usage IN LOJBAN using an ad hoc experimental cmavo which you 
define as pano ju'i dau at first use, and then after people come to accept 
and use such a word repeatedly, the case is built for adding a word to the 
official language after the baseline ends.

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