Subject: Re: zi'o & otpi (was: RE: [lojban] So, wait til you feel a cold no-nose

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 16:30:12 PDT

la and cusku di'e

>The language
>will either be defined by usage, in which case its grammar will
>be relatively vague and indeterminate, or it will be defined by
>formal documentation, in which case usage will largely be
>irrelevant.

In some cases formal documentation may follow usage. Suppose
that in 2015 someone decides to publish a Lojban
dictionary and instead of just taking them from the gismu
list, for the gismu places they ask a panel of 100 fluent
Lojbanists about some place structures that they're not
too sure about. They ask what they think are the
place structures without looking them up. Then if there
is enough agreement among the speakers on a place structure
different than the gihuste's they print that preferred
place structure. If the dictionary becomes authoritative
it would be a definition by formal documentation based
on usage.

>(Presumably, until computers are as intelligent as
>people, computers would have to speak the formally documented
>version.)

Computers can't speak any version at all for the moment,
so there is time to document the actually used version
if it differs from what is defined.

>So better than zi'oing off unwanted places, or pretending they're
>not there, is to use some alternative brivla. If VCCV fu'ivla
>really are kosher then they are an attractive solution, since
>they're even shorter than gismu,

They are not very attractive to me, and the shortness is
more than compensated by the obligatory preceding pause.

>So, for example, if you want a word for
>"bottle such that something actually is a bottle even when
>it's empty", then you could use "otpi" (with, in lujvo, the
>same rafsi as "botpi"). If "otpi" were as well-documented as
>"botpi", it'd stand a chance of competing against it in usage,
>and then usage really would tell you which was the more popular.

"otpi" would probably only be used to mean "empty bottle",
because there is a much better alternative for non-empty
ones.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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