Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: zo xruti xruti

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 22:54:36 +0100

Lojbab:
> At 10:18 PM 8/9/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > > A formal change to the baseline for something "broken" strikes me as 
> > better
> > > than having two different place structures documented in the list for any
> > > language version. In that I go beyond agreeing with xod.
> >
> >This seems a bad idea to me, if we define "broken" not as "doesn't work"
> >but instead as "doesn't work as well as some hypothetical alternative",
> >then the language is reopened to debates about its design & I would
> >feel compelled to get involved again.
> 
> We couldn't have that now %^)
> 
> Seriously, I suspect that only things that "don't work" will get through 
> the filter to the point of serious change consideration, but documenting 
> other gripes in a standard way is a good idea anyway, and one possible 
> solution that can be described is to use workaround A, B, or C.
> 
> But I feel that a situation where usage is at such deviation with the 
> documentation that people would feel the *need* (and not merely the desire) 
> to document two different place structures in a wordlist or dictionary is 
> close to the threshold of "seriously broken" given the design 
> philosophy. Unlike the alternate orthographies, I don't think Lojban 
> presently has room for more than one place structure for words that is 
> official enough to be documented before the language documents change from 
> prescriptive to descriptive.

I feel that that change has effectively happened already. It's reasonable
to say that some baselined design feature is seriously broken if nobody
obeys it, but there just doesn't seem much point in altering the baseline
to reflect that; just document usage, and avoid alienating those who
hold the baseline sacrosanct.

If you are going to follow place-structure usage in deciding whether it
conflicts with the baseline, I think the most important exercise would
be to check which places never get used (i.e. not even when filled by
an implicit zo'e). That's not an easy task, but that is where the
greatest brokenness is.

--And.