Subject: [lojban] Re: prescription & description (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 22:07:30 +0200

Invent Yourself:
> On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Lionel Vidal wrote:
> > A Naturalist could maybe consider jboske as just a tool to better
> > understand what Lojban ba'e is, through discussions on how it
> > could/should/may be.
>
> le smuni be zoi gy. ba'e is .gy bei do be'o cu jai cfipu mi .i le zu'o
> jboske cu zu'o casnu le da'i lojbo

Ok, I was not very clear. I meant {ba'e is} as a more aesthetical
written emphasis than {IS} or {*is*}. I agree it is not a very good
or even meaningful usage.
My point was that even if a Naturalist is opposed to any prescriptive
change (or to a mere usage proposal or semantic interpretation that
he may understand as a prescriptive change), he could nonetheless gain
a better understanding of Lojban by just trying to solve the involved
problem with what he would call a strict baselined solution.
Whether he posts his solution to be further discussed or dismisses the
problem as just trivial is irrelevant: he has just made a step, even a small
one, towards the fluency graal.
And IMO these steps tend to be not so small, as most of the problems
that are discussed lead to different often enlighting solutions among
Naturalists themselves (and these solutions could also often enlight
the understanding of non-Naturalists as well).

-- Lionel