WikiDiscuss

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> On 5/16/05, John E Clifford
> <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > I was ovbjecting to BAI that are not
> > iin the language to begin with (except in
> these
> > barely justifiable examples).
>
> It is not clear what "being in the language"
> means to you.
> All BAIs under discussion have been listed in
> the ma'oste
> for years. None has been added since I joined
> Lojban
> in '94.

How many of them have been used? That is the
most significant feature of being in the
language. There is also the matter of form,
whereby anything of a certain form could be in
the language in a certain role. So, given a BAI
in the language as a BAI, any SEBAI could be in
the language as a BAI. At some point — I don't
much care when, though it was after whenever my
paper list was made up — a number of BAI were
added on the basis — as far as I can tell — of
that second sense of being in the language. It
may be that some few of these have been used (my
list has a large handful of SEBAI, enough to
establish the pattern). The rest seem merely to
be an excresence.

> > Well, I agree that keywords are generally not
> > very useful — even misleading in many cases
> --
> > but my protest is exqactly to including them
> in
> > the dictionary when they have never occrred
> in
> > the language. Will all the 100000 or so
> gismu be
> > included?
>
> Not sure what you mean by that. There are
> 1400 or so gismu in the language.

But around 100,000 CVCCV and CCVCV forms.

> > What about all the cmavo in /x/?
>
> I would include {xa'o}, but I doubt I'll get my
> way.

Butwhat about all the rest? This is a
particularly interesting case, because it brings
in forms whose meaning cannot even be guessed at
in advance, while I suppose there are some limits
(though I would hate to try to figure out what
they are) to what a SEBAI might mean, given the
BAI and perhaps the "related brivla."

> > Or
> > the as yet unused CV'V'VV? And so on. It
> isn't
> > even that there are plausible cases that
> these
> > BAI forms ought to be used, in most
> instances.
>
> But unfortunately the BAIs are not in
> experimental
> space. They are a standard part of the official
> cmavo,
> all of which need defining.

No, they need editing if they are already in, and
a note about how to get them back in if a need
for them arises,

> > I have no objection to clarifying — even
> > prescribing to some extent — the existing
> usage.
> > It does seem to me that some expressions have
> > been used inconsistently (or at least
> unclearly)
> > and inappropriately for their intended roles
> (as
> > subordinate clauses, for example, rather than
> > added places in the case of BAIs). But that
> is
> > very different from creating NEW usages out
> of
> > whole cloth (and based on nothing real at
> all).
>
> We obviously have a different perception of the
> issue.

Actually, we seem to me to agree rather well:
these things do not at present have any business
being presented as a part of actual Lojban,
worthy of a line in a dictionary.

>
> > Well, we have discussed half a dozen cases
> over
> > the last little while: two that stick in mind
> > without searching are {du'u}, whose meaning
> is
> > not related by the "rules" to {djuno} (more
> to
> > {jinvi} or {krici} — which pair of words
> needs
> > some work, come to think of it)
>
> Well, that's the kind of clarification I'm
> after. Should
> {du'o} be {fi'o djuno}, or something much
> wider?
>
> >and {ri'anai},
> > whose meaning violates both {rinka} and
> {nai}, as
> > typically understood in this game of BAI
> > creation, and is not easily constructed in
> this
> > way from other brivla.
>
> {to'e ri'a nai} is the more regular
> construction for
> "not prevented by/in spite of".
>
But the official line does not contain {to'e},
nor ought it Zipfily. And the claim that it is
regular presupposes that there are rules, which
is not obviously the case.