Subject: RE: [lojban] registry of experimental cmavo - new proposals featuring XOhA and UI and BAI

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 19:59:20 +0100

Craig:
> I have some other experimental cmavo to propose.

This is quite a useful exercise, because through it one finds out that
with a greater or lesser amount of contortion, Standard Lojban can
already do a lot of things that one wanted it do but felt it couldn't.
I'll summarize this for my proposals in another later message, but
here's a response to yours.

> In selma'o XOhA, I think in
> addition to loglan toggle (xo'a) we need a toggle for each source language.
> Also, a way to mark fu'ivla for the language they derive from, which would
> of course be optional but helpful.
>
> Furthermore, it seems to me that natural evolution of the language will
> inevitably result in dialects forming. There needs to be a system for
> systematically naming dialects as they form, so we can say 'foo speaks
> dialect bar'; I even suggest that we make a gismu with place structure 'x1
> speaks lojban dialect x2'

Any brivla will do. It doesn't have to be a gismu. Grammatically, the only
thing special about gismu is that they're the only brivla with rafsi.

> and also that selma'o XOhA have dialect toggles
> (maybe mutable, see below).
> I expect that people with different aims with lojban will speak different
> dialects, and I want to be able to say so in lojban, and try to communicate
> with more than one, hence the dialect toggle.

Lojban Central would hate for this to happen in reality, but let us consider
it hypothetically. You could mark transition from Standard Lojban to some
other dialect by {di'e me la nonstandard. lojban.} or suchlike, using the
appropriate name for the dialect, but the problem here is that the
intentionally crude parser that loglans cater to would not recognize the
import of this. So I guess you need some novel grammatical device.

> My other proposal is the mutable BAI cmavo.
[....]
> MY usage will start deciding that this is in effect, effective now, unless
someone
> explains why there ISN'T a bai cmavo for EVERY gismu -

{fi'o}, as you now know.

> lobdo'e gismu, this is a house whose lojbanic things include gismu)
> Beyond mutable BAI: A mutable XOhA so that I can switch to speaking punjabi
> and you'll know it, rather than wondering what's coming out of my mouth.

{di'e panjabi} should suffice here, unless you want the parser to know to
stop parsing.

> A mutable KOhA so that people can say 'he' as 'the man-type-of-it' or refer to
> their dog as the dog-it.

This is pretty much what {le nanmu} and {le gerku} mean.

> We would still use the old BAI because they are
> shorter than mutating do'e to say the same thing, and we would still use the
> old KOhA until we had used all five.

(There are ten ko'a series KOhA -- five begin with fo'-.)

> More UI cmavo. The classical geeks had three kinds of love.

That's a wonderful sentence. When I first read it I took it literally.

> let's declare
> all strings of three vowels to be UIA series UI, basically experimental
> attitudinals.

I once proposed (IIRC) that bare cmevla be UI, used for expressive purposes:
krac! bang! uolop! cit!/kalc!.

But a convert-next-word-to-UI function might be nice. I think perhaps
something in COI, that functions as an expressive.

> .a'oesai <where a'oe is like a'o but is CLEARLY DEFINED as non-assertive, I
> don't expect all this to happen and would rather use of a'o not rehash the
> attitudinal debate again, so I will use a'oe for non-assertions that are
> hoped and a'oi for assertions which are 'as i had hoped' and a'oa for
> assertions which give me hope. a'o'o and a'o'u are yet to be determined> (I
> know that doesn't fit the kinds of love model, but a'o sorely needed it.)

I think this one needs more thought. Perhaps the attitudinal problem needs
a solution that is less ad hoc, more systematic.

FWIW, I think the intention behind "a'o" was to express an optative, hence
"I hope that ~ hopefully". "As I had hoped" could be rendered by a {sei}
parenthetical. I don't really need for an interjectional UI that expresses
hope specifically; {au} would suffice. Probably most emotions that you'd
want to express interjectionally can be expressed by UI compounds. To a
nonfluent Lojbanist they seem a bit sterilely overanalytical and
insufficiently expressive, but this is a situation where I think Xod is
right -- once fluent in Lojban the UI compounds would probably become
second nature -- you get your thumb with a hammer, you reach orgasm,
your team scores a goal, and without thinking about it, out of your mouth
pops the appropriate UI compound.

--And.