Subject: Bon Mot re Lojban neutrality

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 14:25:47 -0700 (PDT)

I've been doing a little hunting around wikis, to see what it's all about.
I have to say, I still have cultural problems with it --- particularly the
anonymity; and not everything is suited to it. (Then again,
I think I'm experiencing my first bona fide culture clash.)

In any case, there's a little bit of discussion on Lojban pro and con out
there; and there's this devastating riposte to the benefits of Lojban
cultural neutrality that I think I have to forward here. From
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?AmericanCulturalAssumption . (As you'll see,
each para is from someone else, and unattributed --- though other
comments on the page aren't. The convention is that you sign personal
comments, and don't sign things that build the text proper; but that's
not always adhered to.) The final sentence is becoming a .sig of mine...

***

We could get rid of all of these cultural assumptions by writing the wiki
in a CulturallyNeutralLanguage like LojbanLanguage or EsperantoLanguage or
some such.

How big are city blocks and paper sizes in Lojbanistan and Esperantujo?

Well, due to the central premise of languages like these, we can assume
they would adhere to rational systems. Thus paper sizes would certainly
follow the "A" system.
City blocks are less obvious, but it is probably safe to assume a simple
rational scaling of a kilometre...

Unless people in the country import photocopiers from the US, in which
case they still have to deal with insane paper sizes. The language isn't
the problem. The world is
the problem.

In Lojbanistan, paper size only exists if added modally. Although the x2
place is for the source, so if it's British paper it's an A size. But we
don't care, e-mail has made
paper obsolete (There is no lojban newsletter, for instance.) City blocks
are probably "pipa kiltomitre" - .1 kilometers, which doesn't tell you if
it's "pipa pi'i dau du pa" or
"pipa pi'i vei vai su'i pa ve'o du pa" - .1 could be one tenth or one
sixteenth, and in lojban both bases are used. The default assumption,
however, is base ten... but I like
hex better. [pipa pi'i dau du pa means .1 * A [as in the hex digit for
ten] = 1, pipa pi'i vei vai su'i pa ve'o du pa means .1 * (F [hex digit
for 15] + 1) = 1]

I was under the impression that Lojbanistan was a language community and
not a country. Well. Here in the rest of the world many of us still use
paper, and in American
sizes no less. If you want us to use Lojban, we need a way to say the
photocopier is out of legal paper, even if that allows cultural
assumptions. Wackiness in the real
world means wackiness in any language that describes the real world.
Sorry.

-- 
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Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
[email-masked] -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias