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

From: PILCH Hartmut <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 19:27:52 +0000 (/etc/localtime)

> << 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.>>
...
> 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).

This is more than an analogy.

> <<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).
... 
> 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.

And it is more than historical.

The sequence is determined by how the particular language builds a
composite group (tanru).

When I say "I will go on the 20th" and you ask "20th of what?", I may
answer "20th of June". If that is not clear enough, you again will ask
"20th of June of which year" and I will answer "20th of June of 2000".

In Chinese the expansion goes the other way around. English, especially
American English, has word groups like "NBC's Walter Cronkyte" which
expand at the beginning like Chinese or Lojban. Likewise, "The year
2000's June's 20th day" is possible, and "June 20th" is normal. This is, I
suspect, a reason why 2000-06-05 is becoming popular in the US more than
in Western Europe.

There are other examples of silly centrifugal order in German, e.g. "S 828
BGB", which is just an abbreviation for something like "Section 828 of the
Civil Law". Nobody can argue that it suits human thinking well to first
dive down into a section and then look up and see what body of law we are
talking about. There is no deeper meaning to these language conventions.
They are just habits that evolved out of the language's grammer pattern
and were never questioned, no matter how unpractical the results were.

One can also compare this to some bad conventions used for writing musical
scores in medieval times or in pre-westernisation China. Thise scores
were closely tied to language habits and had not emancipated themselves
from them.

> 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.

Lojban, as a language with a centripetal tanru expansion/elision pattern
is, like Chinese, in the lucky situation that good (temporal and spacial)
positioning abbreviations are likely to evolve from it. If we let it
happen.

-phm