Subject: Re: [lojban] Retraction, Part 1

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2001 16:55:02 -0400 (EDT)

Nick Nicholas scripsit:

> Lesson 14 currently says in an exercise that the 'chicken' Zhang is
> building out of pretzels should not be described as {lo jipci}, but {le
> jipci}. Should this now be eliminated?

I think that lo jipci tarmi, as has been suggested, is the Right Thing.
Tarmi covers a multitude of sins: it is good for cukta tarmi too, the
physical book.

> I still think it is capricious and misleading to call the Web a {cukta},

It certainly is not a prototypical cukta.

> (Now you've only got Lojbab left to convince. :-)

He needs no convincing, for his view is that there is no agreement yet, which
is palpably false. :-)

> ***LESSONS CHANGE***
> 
> I am personally vexed that the outcry against the 'filled places' proposal
> was not raised during the three months the lesson has been available for
> public review (though admittedly it was stated only tentatively there).

In the nature of things, such errors get recognized only in proportion to
the consolidation of the true view. I certainly did not explicit realize
until last night that 11.4.4 was in error.

"Truth comes more clearly from error than from confusion", as Wm. Blake says.

> If enough members of the
> community say so (I will deem 'enough' to be And plus two more), the entire
> section on {ce'u} will be eliminated. If not, I will attempt to write a
> revised lesson section, outlining what now seems to be majority opinion,
> and will solicit people look at it carefully, to make sure I get it right.

Good.

> It's now also
> looking like the second understanding interprets {le ka mi xendo} as "my
> property of being kind", and the first as "my being kind (to others)", read
> as a property of the others --- or alternatively, as tantmount to {le du'u
> mi xendo}, and not actually a property at all. (And and John still differ
> on this, though I suspect they won't for long.)

Indeed, when I first read the claim that "le ka mi xendo" means "my kindness",
I took it as a typo for "le mi ka xendo".

> [I]f it can be stated (as it just
> has been by And) that the example phrase Refgramm 11.4.4 {le ka do xunre cu
> cnino mi} is wrong, and should have been {nu}, then a major shift has gone
> on in how {ka} is understood by a significant part of the community,

And a Good Thing too. When the issue was first raised that led to ce'u
being derived was when I understood what ka was all about in concrete
terms -- the "reified propositional function" -- and my attempts to
communicate this vision were still clouded, not by an older view, but
simply because ka was previously hopelessly vague.

ni is still problematic, and we see this in the refgram's confused presentation
of it. Chapter 11 skates on the thinnest ice of any chapter, save
perhaps for the logic chapter; I had to invent almost all of its semantics
myself, being bequeathed nothing but some vague analogies to English.
Small wonder if I made some self-inconsistencies.

> [T]his definitely invalidates much existing usage

I don't see just how. What is the much-usage that is invalidated?

> In my opinion, the way to 'fix' this, then, is to promulgate it loud and
> wide in the lessons, which should explicitly say that you *shouldn't* say
> {le ka mi xendo} for "my kindness". 

I think it is enough to explain what "le ka mi xendo" actually does mean.
Part of the trouble is that there is no good English paraphrase, since
"kind" disallows passivation in English: *being kind to by me.

> If you live by 'natural > evolution', you die by it too. 

Hear, hear.

> If a cabal of prominent Lojbanists* decides tomorrow to use an x2 for {ka}
> in their writings, as recently independently suggested here,
> 
> (a) is their Lojban wrong? (I am speaking with respect to the
> 'descriptivist' stance, though I guess what I'm really asking is LLG
> policy.)
> 
> (b) are they to be discouraged?
> 
> (c) is such usage not to be documented in an official source, even as a
> used variant?

No, maybe, yes, respectively. The baseline (which is really a documentation
freeze) delimits the official description, and does not at this point
constrain usage (it never has *constrained* it of course, since LLG are
not tyrants). The point of the 5 year period is to see whether the
freeze at that point should be thawed and changed to reflect actual
usage before being refrozen. Nevertheless, official LLG publications
should not at this point be heard to defy other publications, mostly
because it makes us look stoopid.

> (As an added unhelpful remark, I now consider {se du'u} sacred: in my own
> understanding of baselines --- as opposed to any understanding that has
> anything to do with the LLG :-) --- you can add places, but you can't
> subtract them.)

Oh yes. I simply state that it was ill-thought-out for me to
propose it, and that I now think that la'e le du'u etc. is a better way.

> When the two camps can't even agree as to what a property is, I don't see
> how "sufficient usage" will fix anything: one camp uses cmavo X their way,
> the other uses it their way. 

I suspect, though, that the split in E-o happened too late to be healed
by anything but mutual avoidance. But Z's maldotco E-o was just plain
overridden by the community, without any real split.

> [W]e've never had errata before, and I have a strong suspicion this
> clarification may be blocked as violating the baseline. On this, too, I
> will be overjoyed to be proven wrong.

We have had errata; they are just buried in the List archives.

-- 
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan [email-masked]
Please leave your values | Check your assumptions. In fact,
at the front desk. | check your assumptions at the door.
--sign in Paris hotel | --Miles Vorkosigan