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

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 12:01:51 -0400

At 05:00 PM 8/16/02 +0200, Adam Raizen wrote:
>la lojbab. cusku di'e
> > 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 %^).
>
>What exactly is her objection? Is it primarily because it is a baseline change
>(and that agentive 'xruti' is salvageable) or is it because she thinks that
>agentive 'xruti' is better? There have been quite a few people who have 
>objected
>to the change, but all on the grounds that it was a baseline change; no one
>claimed that agentive 'xruti' had any advantages over non-agentive 'xruti'.
>
> > She notes that there are a few other
> > words that have slipped through the agent deletion. fendi, ganzu.
>
>Perhaps those should be fixed, too. It seems that those are less often 
>used, or
>have close non-agentive equivalents (e.g. sepli, nicybi'o), so the need 
>for the
>non-agentive form is less urgent.
>
> > 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".
>
>Non-agentive 'sisti' is easily done with 'tolcfa', so that is not a problem.
>There is no other satisfactory way to get to non-agentive 'xruti'.

I believe (she isn't here now) that her objection is that:

1) it is easy to get from one to the other in all cases. You make a lujvo, 
define a place structure for the lujvo, and it is done. This is true 
either way.

2) The universality of removing agent places was violated by the explicit 
movement she remembered in the reverse direction in the case of sisti. I 
haven't checked whether she remembered correctly, but she has a better 
memory for such things than I do.

3) The lack of uniformity re sisti, fendi, ganzu means that changing for 
the sake of uniformity is more than changing just a single word. Now we 
are starting to get out of the "fix the errors" mode and into "impose new 
design criteria" mode. This threatens the whole concept of the baseline, 
because if we are willing to fix these things, I am sure a list of other 
changes on the same level will be proposed that would be major and 
language-disrupting (and even worse if the change consideration extends to 
the actual words themselves, e.g. the set of culture words, or the gismu 
Jorge thinks should not exist). The baseline exists to stop this kind of 
movement before it starts.

While I made some considerable effort to look for inconsistent place 
structures, I never considered consistency of place structures to be a 
critical design element. But then I also never considered dikyjvo to be 
necessary either. I don't memorize place structures - I either wing it or 
look them up depending on my level of concern for "correctness", and the 
same for lujvo-making. As such, I myself cannot get worked up over 
non-optimal place structures. If it isn't optimal, I'll use a lujvo as my 
basic word, much as I think brivla and selbri (and perhaps tolci'o) have 
become so unitary in most people's minds that they are practically gismu in 
themselves though of the form of lujvo.

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