Subject: RE: [lojban] za'e "postnex"

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 01:48:44 -0500

At 02:01 PM 1/25/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>Lojbab:
> > At 04:46 PM 1/24/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > > > It may require some conventions (grammatical scope being undefined for
> > > > afterthought structures). But predefined conventions are good, 
> even when
> > > > unofficial, in that they eliminate the need to glork from 
> context. (this
> > > > is not to say that >I< will always approve of them)
> > >
> > >Unofficial conventions that conflict with official ones must not be
> > >countenanced except as part of an intentionally nonstandard dialect
> >
> > There are no official conventions on the interpretation of metalinguistic
> > bridi or parenthetical comments, on the scope of the di'u family of "text"
> > references, to my knowledge.
>
>So the official convention is that they are metalinguistic, parenthetical
>and subject to no further conventions.

Metalinguistic, yes. But I don't see how that restricts anything dealing 
with quantification or scope.

Parentheticals are unrestricted and can include metalinguistics or not; I'm 
not sure there is any restriction at all to what you can say in a 
parenthetical, and there is no convention that says that the parenthetical 
is of any differing import than the main discussion - it is just a way to 
embed a text structure into another text with minimal restriction. What it 
means is what it says it means.

I don't have any idea why you would think that anything in Lojban isn't 
subject to additional conventions, should a group of speakers decide to 
adopt them, provided that they can communicate what they are, and provided 
that the text parses.

>Unofficial conventions would conflict with that.

They would conflict with the latter of those three, but it has never been 
claimed as a rule, so far as I know.

> > >The official interpretation of your examples is known, and should
> > >not be subverted by unofficial conventions. The place for establishing
> > >unofficial conventions in in the experimental cmavo, such as zo'au
> >
> > Or in metalinguistic comments expressed solely in Lojban
>
>Well, yes: you can add a metalinguistic comment to say "this text
>is not to be interpreted as Standard Lojban but instead according
>to a dialect that differs in the specified ways". Perhaps you could
>specify the ways by quoting an url to a webpage that defines them.

Or you could use a name or fu'ivla that refers to some commonly understood 
set of conventions.

>It doesn't really matter how you keep the dialects distijnct, so
>long as you don't intercontaminate them.

If you intercontaminate them, you might have to do a lot of dialect 
marking. But imagine that someone from your side of the pond is talking in 
a group with at least one someone from my side. Merely by identifying my 
side's representative as "American" and your side's representative as 
"British", we know how to interpret the different dialectal usages in a 
reported conversation, even when they are mixed.

Of course it also might be that the American won't understand the Brit, or 
vice versa. %^)

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org