WikiDiscuss

1. After going to meetings and reading list for 30 years, I can assure that — whatever they say publicaly — every person who has spent enough time on Loglan or Lojban to feel up to talking about it has something they want to change. Some many things or broad changes, some details, almost everyone additions.

2: There have been no shortage of alternatives proposed, just none that got the right sort of support behind it (I think I have made three and & at least two others — but those cancel eachother out, of course joke). The problems with {le} (which is a non-starter) and {loi} (which does one small part of the work in some contexts) is that they, like {lo}, already have clear uses prescribed. I think that too many people have thought that Lojban was set in concrete or that no proposal would be accepted (because there were those in power who held that nothing may change — a holdover from Loglan, where it was often true, unless you could convice JCB that he thought of it, which did happen occasionally). So the slogged on with makeshifts rather than getting together a good case: examples, clear explanation why nothing currently works, clear explanation of how the proposed extension works, estimates of cost and advantage and so on. That is a lot of work for one person to do and
loCCan has not been very good at creating committees that actually do things (what gets done gets done by one person doing it). My comment was an attempt to shortcut the process slightly: after fifty years of carping it is clear that there are something which we want to say but which all are attempts to say in current language have ended in failure. Let's just create ways to say them and get on with it. If we do figure out how to say them without all the additions (and once they get said a lot that is a real possibility) then we can drop the additons and retrofit the text corpus. Since at least 1976, when I started seeing the carping, claims fuzzily between all and some, claims about the substance of things, and claims about nodes in the great conceptual tree (not usually put that way, to be sure) have come along annually (if not daily). I take that as enough data, let's fix it.

3. I know how it is labelled and I know the effect of seeing something in official looking print, especially with the kind of power that BPFK appears to wield. That it is not a done deal or even close can't be emphasized too often (actually, I suppose it could: if it gave the impression that nothing was ever done and so there was either no point in trying or that one might as well toss everything in one's head into the hopper since it is all persiflage anyhow).

4: I don't think that a teacher reading it for guidance has anydoubt who the writer has in mind: the teacher reading this copy for guidance. The casual reader doesn't either: the teacher who is using the guidelines in an actual situation. This is a perhaps metaphorical sense of in mind but the point is that, in a given case, the teacher meant is always specific, not just any old teacher. The whole could be framed differently, as a report of what went on in a (according to the authors) well-run classroom or as a general direction for how a classroom ought to be run, but this is direction for how you the student teacher are to go.

5: But number may not be irrelevant here, one is quite capable of being interested in reporting a smear of two-dogs on the highway. I forget all the proposals and all the cases for and against; I just note this has been a problem over the years, so let's fix it, The {rectu} only works for the (mainly) edible parts of critters, not for goo.

6: Asserts.
Jorge Llambías <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
pc:
> As for there being
> something wrong with current Lojban, we have known that for as many years as
> there has been current Lojban and have tried to fix it countlless times.

1.Not sure who you mean by "we", but some people think that nothing
should be touched.

> It
> sounds as though the fact that people were not called out on those uses of
> {lo} in the past kept them from looking for legitimate ways to speak in
> generalities.

2:People were called out on those uses all the time, you can see
that from the list archives. The problem is that we could say
{su'o lo} was wrong but we could not say what was right instead.
Any way of generic speaking could be objected to. And {lo} is not
the only thing people use for lack of something better. {le} and
{loi} are also popular alternatives.

> It may turn out that, on zipfy
> gounds for example, we want to start to use {lo} in this way and a longer
> expression for old {lo} (arguably, {su'o} already works), but that is a major
> decision, not to be made casually and without comment to speak of on a wiki
> page (and so looking remarkably like a done deal).

3. The wiki page is clearly labeled as a proposal, and it is clearly
part of the BPFK work we are doing. This is a proposal to be
discussed, amended as necessary, and voted on.

> 10: Ahah! Context makes a difference; it looked like a report but it was a
> direction ({e'u} or {e'o} or {ei} or maybe something more complex). Still,
> as read by each particular teacher and applied in a particular classroom, it
> is quite particular, so {le ctuca} and {le or {lei} selctu}.

4: So even though the speaker does not have any particular
teacher in mind, you think he should use {le} because some teacher
reading it might have a particular one in mind? What about other
readers that may simply be interested in teaching methods but not
in actually performing this particular lesson?

> 12. Even if {lo} is generic in the sense set out here. To be sure, for the
> uncountables (in English), {lo djacu} comes pretty close to being about the
> substance in extension at least. But that doesn't work for countables lo
> bakni are cattle, not beef.

5:{lo tu'o gerku} is proposed for the dog all over the pavement.
"Beef" however is probably better as {bakni rectu}.
({ractu rectu} for rabbit.)

> 15: Where is the implicit negation in {nitcu}? To be sure, needing implies
> lacking; but it does not assert it.

6:Does {claxu} assert not having, or does it just imply it?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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