Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Looking down

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 23:56:29 -0400

At 02:35 AM 07/17/2001 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>la lojbab cusku di'e
> > >And this business about usage deciding is a canard. If noone knows what
> > >{fa'a} is there for, noone will use it, and usage won't determine squat.
> >
> >I suspect that Cowan and I at least know what it is used for.
>
>I suspect you don't. I have used {fa'a} several times in the Alice
>translation with the directional, not the locational sense. If this
>is wrong then you should start using it in the "correct" way or
>usage will decide otherwise.

That is inherently the risk in the way we are running the project, that a 
couple of usages could catch on that are deviant from what we intended, and 
even deviant from the Book. I don't think that a single translation by one 
user establishes usage though. These esoteric things on the fringe will 
probably not be used enough to say that usage has decided for many 
years. Until then, your usage and mine are merely 2 of the thousand 
flowers that pc has insisted that we should let bloom. Thus, until a 
thousand people have used fa'a, we won't really be *sure* how fa'a works.

> (And maybe you should also tell us how to render the directional sense.)

I can't keep straight which sense is which in this discussion, so I don't 
know what you are asking for. Can you give an English sentence wherein 
both a directional sense and a locative sense actually make sense, so I 
know what the issue is?

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org