Subject: Re: [lojban] Lojban / Most translated Web Page

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 14:17:45 EDT

In a message dated 5/8/00 7:17:51 AM CST, [email-masked] writes:

<< The structure of lojban tanru is like yyyy-mm-dd: central part in the
end, delimiting peripherals prepended (or elided) as far as necessitated
by the context.>>
Well, that is judgmental; why is the day number the modified and the year the 
modifier? Because that same day number will come round again? And the year 
picks out a member of the sequence of those dates? But, of course, the year 
is also a sequence of days -- and a more natural one than the sequence of May 
8's -- and the date then picks a subsequence and then an individual, a 
perfectly reasonable sort of modifier-modifed structure, too.
In short, this particular analogy does not seem to be decisive, since it 
can be made to cut either way (though I think the dmy version is more 
plausible).

<<The ddmmyy structure comes from latin and other west-european languages,
where the composites are built using the genitive (or English 'of'):
central part in the beginning, delimiting peripherals appended (or
elided).

day 3 of month 12 of year 1999

This would perfectly translate into a Lojban tanru structure of

1999 12 3

which could of course, when needed, be transformed to

3 be 12 be 1999>>

While I will buy the historical claim, the move to Lojban -- and the move 
within Lojban -- make no sense to me at all, quite aside from the issue of 
what all this has to do with tanru.

It is good to see that we agree (I think) about what a single number in the 
date slot means (day); we disagree how most lojbanically to get there from a 
full date.