Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 19:44:50 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 11 May 2000, PILCH Hartmut wrote:

> But in a more individualistic society, people are no longer predominantly
> referenced by family. That is why the American habit of using "Nora" even
> in such a non-intimate circle as this forum is very modern, and may seem
> strange to Asians and Europeans, who may feel that Americans are
> aggressively tearing down distance and pretending to be on intimate terms
> with people, with whom polite distance, i.e. relating to one another in
> terms of a stratified address system with different layers of closeness,
> as in traditional society, would be more honest and appropriate.

Fascinating! Are Asians and Europeans truly outraged by our
"aggressive" use of first names?

I preferred ymd because like one of the readers of this list, I recently
realized its sorting superiority when dealing with a number of filenames
with dates appended. "filename-2000-05-11" sorts in the proper
order; "filename-11-05-2000" does not. But this could be fixed with a
smarter directory sorting algorithm. This is the chief problem with
"thinking like a computer"; invariably we end up thinking like poor
software instead.

In general, little endian makes more sense. I live in Soho. If you don't
know where that is, I'll tell you it's in Manhattan, and so on. If I am
not sure how much of that context you'll need and you're not within reach
for a discussion, I can write out the terms in order of descending
probability of need, and you'll quit reading once you have enough context,
presumably eliding the ", Earth, Milky Way Galaxy" at the end. I don't
understand Hartmut's argument concerning the way the human brain
works. (Hartmut Who? Hartmut Pilch.) This is place-structure like because
the less-important facts are stuck further toward the end. 

It is surely true that holding "follow how other languages do it" as a
value will result in an Interlingua, and I am surprised to see it raised
as a point in the debate over date conventions.

Personally I interpret the spirit of Lojban as accepting modern
international standards (meters & kilograms, celsius, utc time, iso dates,
etc) unless a really good reason interferes. Consistent elision aside, if
a number is given as a date/time with some implied elided context, its
exact nature will have to depend on the context of the discussion. This
is not bad! zo'e is a theme which runs throughout Lojban by necessity.

-----
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