Subject: Re: What the heck is this crap?

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 15:21:23 +1100

Oh, and a meta-note?

Now you know how I felt about having to relearn {ka... ce'u}.

Folks, I may be regarded as tainted by hardlinerism in saying this, 
but really, relax. This is not a disaster. Just as {ka.. ce'u} 
wasn't. But it does accord with how we understand scoping to work in 
general; and yes, I believe that scoping takes precedence over place 
conversion.

If enough people feel it shouldn't, then it won't happen in actual 
spoken Lojban. But the scoping thing is, I believe, consistent with 
the spirit of Lojban. It's *loj*-ban for a reason, after all. You can 
say the scoping rule is a natural-language inspired piece of 
arbitrariness, shoehorned into formal logic; but there does have to 
be *a* rule for scoping somewhere. If {ro da cu xebni su'o de} == 
{su'o de cu se xebni ro da}, then how do we pick whether the primary 
meaning is AxEy or EyAx? By the unconverted bridi? But what if we 
wanted to define {bu'a} as {se xebni}? Would {su'o de cu bu'a ro da} 
still mean "everyone hates something"?

But yes. We do need a _Lojban for Intermediates_. And it needs to be 
smooth and paedagogical -- the formal definition can wait, or can 
stay on 'that other list'.

Btw, this is why the list schism is bullshit, as far as I'm 
concerned. Naturalists ignore what the jboskeists say at their own 
peril. And the jboskeists bore non-jboskeists shitless --- more 
importantly, to the point of tuning out --- at their own peril.

Yeah. This dictionary compilation sure is going to be a barrel of laughs... :-|
-- 
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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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