Subject: More stuff

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 02:41:51 +1100

1.

Message: 7
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 18:37:34 -0600
From: Jordan DeLong <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Specific example of Sapir-Whorf in English OR How Lojban 
made me think more clearly

> I use big-endian in english, but lojban's specified (I think? I
> only remember this from nick/robin's lessons; dunno what, if anything,
> the book says) to use little endian.

A lot of this is lore, encoded in Bob's draft textbook, and in members' 
decisions passed in '92 or something. I don't know whether this stuff 
counts as baseline. I think the BPFK can also reconsider such matters 
if they're outside the present baseline (i.e. CLL). And lore itself is 
repealable; the draft textbook advocated 12 hr time, and when I raised 
the issue for Lojban For Beginners last year, the overwhelming 
consensus was 24 hr time (to a large extent because we had no elegant 
way of combining numerical times with AM/PM, and the cmene approach 
advocated in the draft textbook didn't look like it could deal with 
minutes.)

Whether the BPFK need bother with this kind of issue, I'm not sure. 
Maybe this stuff should not be baselined one way or the other. We can 
debate this, maybe even now...

Adam proposed ma'i for specifying which kind of possible world is being 
referred to. I had in mind ti'o as the metalinguistic marker for this 
kind of thing. Look it up in CLL and tell me if you think it can fly.

2. ka'enai

My current position on ka'enai: we should not change it, because that 
exceeds our mandate, as it would cause a major grammar change. I 
believe it would be a change for the better, and I think the semantic 
concern Jordan raises would be easily resolvable: contradictory 
negation with connectives, scalar everywhere where scale is possible. 
But on both counts, it's too late for this to be politically feasible. 
Whether in an ideal world (we get put on the time ship and go back to 
1988) it would be desirable or not.

3. Message: 20
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 20:06:31 -0600
From: Jordan DeLong <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: Why we should cancel the vote or all vote NO (was RE: 
Official Statement- LLG Board approves new baseline policy

> We assign lau'oi to selma'o LAU, with the exact meaning of lau.
> We assign tei'oi to selma'o TEI, with the exact meaning of tei.
>
> A statement is made that "lau'oi" and "tei'oi" should be used in
> stead of "lau" and "tei", because lau and tei may be reclaimed in
> the distant future for their monosyllabicness.
>
> However, since no one but me supports this more moderate approach
> to this, and the whole point would be to try to make both you and
> everyone else happy about future Zipf possibilites, I'm pretty much
> going to have to abandon it and go with everyone else in the view
> that we should not worry about Zipf at all.

I like it, and would be willing to consider it in a very few cases of 
cmavo (such as these). I won't say anything stronger than that now, 
because I don't have a mandate to.

If that helps. :-)

The following is my personal opinion:

As to tei/foi specifically (see, one more monosyllable), Unicode 
concretely says that tei .ebu .akut.bu foi decomposes as .ebu .akut.bu 
(that e acute is two characters). I don't think the sky will cave in if 
we say that in Lojban, all composed characters are read out as their 
constituent parts, with diacritic after character. We adopt one way of 
doing things rather than admitting complete freedom? Yeah, so? We do 
that all the time in Lojban: it's called having a syntax. If you insist 
that e-acute is to be considered a single character, then call it 
explicitly .e'akut.bu . If you want to be frisky about whether 
diacritics go before or after the letter (which tei/foi allow), I say, 
to hell with you. Lojban enforces precedence like there's no tomorrow 
in MEX; and it's to go all hippy with letterals? You can say either 
{.ebu .akut.bu} or {e'akut.bu}; you don't need to also be able to say 
both {tei .ebu ,akutbu foi} and {tei ,akutbu .ebu foi}. What possible 
point does such freedom serve? As for digraphs, I'd much rather 
{.a'ebu} than {tei .abu .ebu foi} for the ash (&aelig;)...

This means that I think tei/foi are pointless, and don't mind what 
happens to them. I support Jordan's take of deprecating tei and 
counterproposing tei'au or whaatever, because it is gradualist; it's 
the only way I can see to uphold the baseline and still nudge the 
offending cmavo out of the way. If everyone on the BPFK decided to toss 
this section of the baseline, I'd go along with it too; but since there 
will be fundies there, I doubt they will.

{lau} is marginally more useful, but only marginally. Punct is not so 
frequent that the world would cave in if {lau} had an extra syllable. 
We've never used {lau} the one place where punctuation lerfu have been 
used extensively --- 
http://www.lojban.org/wiki/index.php/Keyboard%20key%20names . I believe 
{lau} is trying to solve a problem that isn't there.

So the case for the sanctity of tei, foi, lau is *only* the case for 
the existing baseline stability. They haven't been used, and I don't 
see them filling much of a niche. They're not the cmavo I'd want to 
make a stand on...

end private opinion. And's said pretty much the same as my last para, I 
see.

4. Message: 3
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 02:47:53 -0000
From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Subject: nature of debate (was: RE: Re: Why we should cancel the vote 
or all vote NO (was RE: Official Statement- LLG Board approves new 
baseline policy

> So debates that are not purely ideological need two phases, ideally.
> A first phase for all the arguments to be raised. And a second
> phase to force people to reach some kind of consensus position.
> Nick has got the second phase well-thought out, but I wanted to
> urge him to give the first phase a bit more scope.

I hadn't clicked you meant the BPFK not the board. i admit the current 
statement is kneejerk guillotining discussion, at least at the outset. 
I can accept that the statement should also include a record of past 
dispute (X said A, Y said B. These were the reasons. This instance of 
usage supports A, this B), as well as a recommendation of a new 
meaning. I don't want substantial new discussion, but if and when it 
happens, a shepherd is a very good idea. I think in the first instance, 
the shepherd should be the proposer of the first definition. Since 
they've gone through the corpus and all prior discussion, they are the 
expert on the topic by definition, whether their take on the issue 
prevails or not.

Not putting this on the wiki yet, because I want to see if others think 
this will encourage things to drag out unnecessarily,

5. Message: 5
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 03:16:39 -0000
From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Subject: factionalization (was: RE: Re: Why we should cancel the vote 
or all vote NO (was RE: Official Statement- LLG Board approves new 
baseline policy

> Robin:
>> Factionalization pisses me off
>
> How would you like things to work? Am I right in thinking that you
> would like everybody to reach consensus, by the minority abandoning
> its dissent for the sake of the greater good? I think this is what
> Lojbab yearns for.

Eh, I'd prefer it too; but consensus won out over majority vote, and I 
now agree with it. This doesn't always or necessarily mean majority 
yields. It can also mean watering down and compromise.

Factions exist; I define 'em, I defend them. We have different 
interests in Lojban, we don't want them marginalised. Bob may have 
defined Lojban to test SW, and uses that to justify his rejection of 
defining any semantics. But if 90% of the community want a semantics, 
they prevail (as Bob admits, which is why he's consenting to a BPFK in 
the first place.) And has no right to ban xod from pursuing SWism; xod 
has no right to tell And to abandon jboske. I don't even have a problem 
with individuals tinkering; I have a problem with it becoming 
politically dominant in the community, to the point of endangering 
language continuity. (In fact, in yet another one of those reversals 
that Bob has been gracing us with of late :-) , he considers Lojbanist 
tinkering to be legitimate in providing us with Lojban Mark II --- as 
long as it happens after we're all dead or something :-) .)

We must arrive at a common standard. But we do so, I believe, by 
acknowledging we want different things, and seeing how we can work our 
way around that; not by suppressing or ignoring that difference.

But that isn't quite parliamentary democracy either. Parliamentary 
democracy works by majority rule, not consensus, after all.

Or maybe I'm just naive. :-) We'll see...

OK, I'm going to stop defending And here, because I don't want Robin 
whaling on my ass. :-) Look, we gotta work together. If I have my way, 
I'll get And and xod and Jay and Robin and Jordan and everyone with 
something to say into the same place, and we'll all produce a 
dictionary. That means we accept there are constraints on what we do. 
It also means we accept each other's bonafides.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
^^
Dr Nick Nicholas. French/Italian, "Rode like foam on the river of pity
University of Melbourne Turned its tide to strength
http://www.opoudjis.net Healed the hole that ripped in 
living"
[email-masked] - Suzanne Vega, Book Of Dreams
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