BPFK Section: lerfu Shifts
On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 07:23:52AM -0800, John E Clifford wrote:
> And, if you're in a context where you can't draw the symbol at all:
> (1) What will you gain from describing the symbol?
> (2) Wouldn't you be better off describing how it's drawn, instead of
> its
> lerfu name?>>
>
>
> The same objections apply, of course, to all lerfu. I would assume that the various implication marks had different names (single arrow, double arrow, horseshoe, hook, to mention the most common). And why, exactly (though you claim to have explained it before) is pronouncing the symbol useless?
>
> In the good old days (about last week it seems) the fact that somone thought he had a use for something in lojban was enough for half-a-dozen people to start with suggestions about how to do it; it was rarely the case that the response was to try to convince him he really had no such use (and, maybe, didn't even rally think he did).
The problem is not that the name of a symbol isn't expressible in
Lojban. It's that it's as expressible as it is in other languages. If
you have a symbol you want to call a horseshoe, you can call it "lo
xircutci tarmi sinxa".
But there's something that makes people want to express this, not using
a meaningful phrase like "lo xircutci tarmi sinxa", but using some
clever, contrived, and generally incomprehensible cmavo trick.
I remember hearing that when Lojban was being originally developed,
people wanted to be able to express every conceivable typographical
symbol with its own cmavo, so the _entire_ c??? cmavo space was
suggested to be set aside for lerfu. (pc, you could probably get the
details more accurate than I'm getting them, of course).
I assume that somebody suddenly remembered that Zipf guy, because
thankfully that didn't happen.
Was that the quashing of a useful feature that someone wanted? No, that
was keeping sanity in the language. (Still, the lerfu fetish managed to
leave its mark in the form of 'lau'.) The trend that I try to fight is
that someone says they don't know how to express a certain thing in
Lojban, and several people propose _new language constructs_ (sure, they
can be hacked out of old cmavo, but they're a new interpretation) to say
that thing, even when existing constructs in the language already work.
Coming up with new language constructs is fun, but unless they're
actually beneficial they simply make Lojban more complicated.
--
mu'o mi'e rab.spir