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

From: Adam Raizen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 22:01:39 +0200

la lojbab. cusku di'e

> 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.

'sezyxru' (and 'vo'a zei xruti' and any other lujvo I can think of
other than 'zilpavyxru') often do not have the necessary meaning. One
often wants to say that something reverted to a former state, without
implying that there was any agent in the process, even an agent who is
identical with the patient. There are many languages which derive an
agentless 'broda' with 'broda vo'a' or 'sezybroda', but that is
somewhat idiomatic and, I think, out of place in lojban. If you don't
think of lujvo components as anything more than mnemonics, then maybe
that is not a problem, but for me it is completely against the spirit
of lojban. (I concede that 'zilpavyxru' would have the necessary
meaning, but it is unnecessarily long and complicated.)

> 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.

I think that best solution to this, rather than changing the place
structure of 'xruti', is to create a new gismu using the gismu
algorithm. This will preserve everyone's existing lojban and the
baseline, and should also satisfy those clamoring for the change,
since an extra gismu will not hurt anything, and it will be easier to
get people to start using a new gismu correctly, than to get them to
use 'xruti' in a way inconsistent with the baseline.

mu'o mi'e .adam.