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

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 20:15:54 -0400

At 10:54 PM 8/11/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > 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.

I should note that Nora opposes the xruti change at the moment, so my 
willingness to consider the change if written up does not mean that lojbab 
is giving up on the baseline %^). She notes that there are a few other 
words that have slipped through the agent deletion. fendi, ganzu. In 
particular she notes that sisti is now agentive, and she believes that it 
wasn't originally (parallelling cfari), and was made agentive because 
"usage demanded it".

>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 we document usage and at the same time say the prescription is other 
than usage, then people will wonder which they should use. That really is 
the only reason I favor making a decision and going one way or the other.

As a comparison, in my draft dictionary changes, I've put a usage note on 
slabu that people tend to use tolci'o for "old", but this does not make 
using slabu wrong, just not used as much. Nothing is rendered invalid by 
this note, so I am confident that it is not a change to the baseline.

A change in place structures deleting a place near the beginning means 
that, not only are the older usages "wrong", and writings before the change 
rendered erroneous, but any lujvo made using the word will be 
misconstructed in its place structure according to dikyjvo 
conventions. Thus place deletion of an x1 is a BIG change that is best 
dealt with early. (Has anyone used xruti in a lujvo with a place structure 
indicating either agentive or non agentive?)

>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.

At this point, I think that people are still far too malrarna and prone to 
use only 1 or 2 places by natural language habit to know if nonusage is 
really a sign of brokenness. In addition, usage is far too skimpy to trust 
that it will have shown what places are "never used".

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