From jcowan@reutershealth.com Thu Feb 17 08:00:02 2000 X-Digest-Num: 367 Message-ID: <44114.367.1999.959273826@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2000 11:00:02 -0500 From: John Cowan Subject: Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown A Rosta wrote: > Where there's a will there's a way. Hear, hear. > For starters, the two lexicogrammars > could be discrete subcomponents of a single macrogrammar, so that by > choosing some appropriate lexical indicator at the start of the text > one could indicate whether one were writing Loglan in classical or Lojban > mode. A possible candidate would be the little-word "hoa", which is not currently defined in Loglan (or not in the posted version of L1, anyhow). This would mean "What follows is Lojban". The corresponding Lojban cmavo, "xo'a" (pronounced about the same way) has already been explicitly reserved for experimental use, like all little-words beginning with "x". For those subscribing to this convention, it would mean "What follows is classical Loglan". Nicely, the vowels "oa" appear in "Loglan" and "Lojban". For example: xo'a I cao eo djupo la Lojban! hoa .i .e'osai ko sarji la loglan. (Translation notes: There seems to be no equivalent of "sai" in classical Loglan, so I have used "cao", which is like Lojban "ba'e". The "ko" in the Lojban version means "you" but also marks the sentence as imperative: mere omission of the x1 argument does not make not an imperative in Lojban.) > A stage beyond that would be to define word-for-word equivalences > between the Lojban and classical Loglan lexicons. This will happen: the technical information is in LLG's hands, and the necessary permissions are being sought even as we speak. In some cases, word-for-wordness cannot be readily achieved, because etymologically corresponding gismu/prims have evolved to different place structures. Cleverly created complexes/lujvo could solve this problem. > >From that point on, usage would decide the eventual outcome, given the > tendency of most people to emulate the language of their peers. "Let usage decide": a slogan of the Unified Loglan Project. (By talking about "unified Europe", people made it so. I aim to do the same.) -- Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)