Subject: Re: [lojban] Retraction, Part 1

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 19:43:00 +0100

>>> Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]> 08/19/01 11:47am >>>
#4. I retract my proposal that the default place for {ce'u} be x1, filled or
#not.
#
#I recall And in the past month saying "if anything has been settled by
#usage by now, it's this." My recall is pretty bad, it's now seeming; and
#And certainly no longer holds this opinion. 

I think I was referring to the convention that an *empty* x1 is filled by
{ce'u/ke'a} (according to John the convention is understood more broadly
by some as putting ce'u/ke'a in the first empty place). 

(I think both conventions are unfortunate, for reasons I've given elsewhere.)

#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). 

Sorry. I was meaning to get round to reading them, but other things
came first. But I hadn't realized they might be containing anything 
controversial. Unfortunately I'm back at work now and shorter of
time than before.

#Not going to argue pro or con; I'm now past caring, and as usual I take
#Cowan postings very seriously. (Whether I should is another matter.) 

The sign of infinite wisdom is minimal verbosity....

#6a. The twa {ka}rbies
#We now have two understandings of {ka} abstractions. One is that {ka}
#abstractions always have a {ce'u} place (Raizen, Rosta, xod, now Cowan);

aye

#the other is that they don't (lojbab, pre-1995 usage.) 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 --- 

Right: "the property being been kind to by me" (!)

#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.)

We don't really disagree. We agree that if there were such a thing
as a ka without a ce'u, even a covert one, then it would be equivalent
to a du'u that contains no overt ce'u. We also agree that a ka with no 
overt ce'u must be understood as containing at least one covert ce'u.

#a major shift has gone on in how {ka} is understood by a significant 
#part of the community, and we have serious consequences for the 
#community. Furthermore, this definitely invalidates much existing usage, 

We're like a community of L2 learners without a teacher who knows
the language better than us. Sometimes we discover we've been
making mistakes.

#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.)

I don't think the 'descriptivist/prescriptivist' dichotomy makes sense for
invented languages. But I do think {se ka} would go against LLG
policy, and that anyone who respects that policy (i.e. almost
everyone but me and, much less obstreporously, Jorge) ought to
use an experimental cmavo instead of se ka.

#(b) are they to be discouraged?
#
#(c) is such usage not to be documented in an official source, even as a
#used variant?

An interesting but hypothetical question.

#(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.)

I think you shouldn't be able to do either, though I agree that added
places are, if explicitly marked as present, less of a problem.

#*I am not using "cabal of prominent Lojbanists" in the sense recently
#posted on the Wiki in [Lojban Cabal] and [baseline] as --- a move I do not
#think constructive, btw; the language of [Lojban Central] was rather more
#temperate --- but in the sense of "A group of Lojbanists of good faith"
#that I described to xod in our own Cabal :-) at Logfest.

Are there Lojbanists of bad faith....?

#Whether or not this applies to {ka}, I still do not know. Like I said,
#we'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.

I don't think you can treat textbook usage as constituting infallible
data upon which usual descriptive inductive methods of linguistic 
analysis can operate. Natural languages are not constrained by
prohibitions of ambiguity and suchlike. Hence if, say, in a natlang
is used ambiguously, then it follows that it is ambiguous. But if
in Lojban a term is used ambiguously, then -- well, what? A much
more contentious issue, to say the least.

--And.