Subject: ka'enai

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 12:51:00 +1000

cu'u la djorden.

>>Changing CAhA to allow
>>NAI deliberately is (a few) *people* deciding, not usage deciding.
>>So CAhA+NAI remains bad grammar (what's so bad about saying "na'eka'e"
>>anyway) for now (I suppose after the baseline CAhA+NAI may be
>>adopted).

cu'u la xorxes.

>There is nothing bad about NAhE+KAhE. There is nothing bad about
>KAhE+NAI either. When Lojban forbids some potential form, it is
>usually because allowing it would cause ambiguity. In this case,
>there is no reason for the rule, so the only possible argument
>against using it is that the baseline does not contemplate it. A
>very lame argument for some.

Allow me to equivocate.

(1) Humans impose patterns on grammars. If you've been told that CAhA 
is a tense as much as pu and fa'a; if you've seen that every single 
other tense has NAI; if you see no logical reason why you wouldn't 
say CAhA NAI, then of course you'll say CAhA NAI. I did. I probably 
still do. I don't remember being corrected. If I was, I may have just 
said "dumb rule", and gone about my business, because I may not have 
realised it was fixable (see And's email.) I don't remember, and 
right now, don't really care.

The reason for the asymmetry between CAhA and all the other rules 
seems to me simple: it was forgotten. I'm willing to be corrected on 
this.

And it's counterintuitive, and arbitrary, and people will not do it. 
It has to be pointed out to people that CAhA NAI is wrong; the 
natural assumption is that the grammar is internally consistent, and 
that it is right, and CAhA behaves like all other tenses. 
Particularly as noone's ever given a good reason why it shouldn't 
(have they?) People don't come to Lojban to have to learn exceptions. 
People will not learn 1500 rules when they can learn 500 and 
generalise. Like, duh.

The baseline was dumb on this point; but we'd been told all the while 
that stability was the thing, and noone seems to have cottoned on to 
this. My suspicion is, I never even realised CAhA NAI was 
ungrammatical. I think this exception is so criminally negligent, the 
person responsible should be pilloried. And I agree with And that, 
while there was piecemeal revision in the early '90s, there wasn't 
ever the sense of "now we're throwing everything open for review". 
There was a strong sense that even back then, existing usage 
constrained things. There were a *lot* of rafsi reassignments that I 
myself rejected as forcing too much relearning.

But...

(2) It's too late. The grammar is stuck. I think this rule is wrong, 
and on this particular issue, I'm happy for people to use {ka'enai} 
in real life. Because the rule is dumb. But in official LLG, such as 
will be taught in lessons and published in LLG-approved texts, the 
baseline must be adhered to for the foreseeable future. And I expect 
fundamentalists to use {na'eka'e}.

(And it is possible to be a fundamentalist on most issues, and be 
rankled by one or two.)

Furthermore, if fixes are proposed as techfixes to the grammar (which 
we haven't talked about, but seems unlikely), things would have to be 
really broken; as in, ambiguous. I don't think {ka'enai} passes that 
bar, since NAhE CAhA is, after all, possible.

So I agree with And on this particular issue. The rule was dumb, but 
we're stuck with it, and we need a baseline. I'm happy to see it go, 
it won't go just yet, but I'd like for it to be possible to go one 
day. So I'm happy for it to be 'subverted', in that individuals keep 
saying {ka'enai}. (Try and stop them.) But there must be a Lojban 
standard, and currently {ka'enai} is alien to that standard.

-- 
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* Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian [email-masked] *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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