WikiDiscuss

Chiming in with a rare re fepni:

John E Clifford wrote:
>>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?

Not a valid argument. I wouldn't be surprised if more than half the
cmavo have never been used, in part because the few people doing most of
the writing over the years thought that the definitions in the cmavo
list were inadequate.

A brief history of BAI

Recognizing that JCB had a bunch of different things - including case
tags, causals, and modals, we decided to treat them all as one
interchangeable selma'o now called BAI. The causals and modals among
them had a history of being convertible using SE, TE, etc, and the
causals of being negated (leading to the
because/therefore/despite/nevertheless set of causals).

Because they were grammatically convertible, we looked at what
conversion and negation would do for other BAI members. I believe this
was considered at the time of the negation research you did. I noticed
that several BAIs could be used in this way, especially the one based on
jalge, which was a kind of backwards causal.

People complained (this might have been Nick, and Cowan too) that while
each BAI was nominally associated with some selbri and picked out one
place of that selbri, it was unpredictable which place was the one of
most interest. Some BAIs had several places useful while others seemed
to be either less useful or at least not corresponding to some English
equivalent.

It was then proposed that all BAIs be oriented in the same way as the
selbri they were derived from and take the meaning rigidly from that
selbri. We decided that in <BAI sumti>, the sumti had the semantics
of x1 of the source selbri, SE BAI the x2, etc., making the memorization
easier.

Since we had a pretty fixed set of selbri, I attempted to figure out the
plausible meanings of all the conversions of all the BAIs based on this
rigid association of selbri. I believe that Cowan and Nora reviewed
this list. We recognized that some of these conversions would be
relatively useless, but we weren't about to constrain things because
right about that time, the evolution was tending the other way, and
people were using FIhO+gismu to create all sorts of ad-hoc tags.

We baselined the cmavo list in 1994 with all of the conversion compounds
listed.

> That is the
> most significant feature of being in the
> language.

Since "usage" has been a matter of significance for only a small number
of people until shortly before byfy got started, I have contended all
along that there could not possibly have been enough usage to decide
whether something is "useful" or not.

> 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.

For each of the BAI in the language, there is at least one place that we
could see a need for. The regularizing of BAI semantics means that all
the other options are permissible, but it is precisely because there has
NOT been a good definition for these that we cannot judge based on
usage. We need a 5 year period of usage AFTER we have good definitions.

>>>but my protest is exqactly to including them in
>>>the dictionary when they have never occrredin
>>>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.

The list of gismu, just as the list of BAI, has been baselined for over
10 years.

It takes an act of byfy to delete something from the baseline just as it
would take such an act to add to the baseline.

I oppose any argument for deletion based on usage when usage is
dependent on having good definitions.

>>>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."

The XVV cmavo were by the baseline experimental. It is permissible for
the byfy to change the baseline and assign those XVV to specific things
that have been experimented with, but I would oppose doing that until
all of the existing things have been defined. One option proposed from
the beginning would be, when there is controversy between two different
semantic interpretations of some cmavo, that the least controversial
solution would be to split the cmavo into two. That was specifically
considered during the gadri debate.

Until we have considered all such controversies (i.e. the first cut of
all selma'o), we should not be assigning XVVs except to resolve
controversies. After that, with the wide acceptance of using XVVV space
for experimental use, I will favor the assignment of all remaining XVVs
to the most used experimentals that the byfy thinks are worthy of
including in the official language.

Again, I do not favor any deletions based on non-usage. I will
grudgingly accept a deletion of a baselined cmavo if it seems impossible
to reach a consensus on what it means AND there is no usage history.
But again that is a decision that should not be made until after all
that can be defined have been defined.

>>>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.

The CVVV forms are reserved as experimentals for the indefinite future,
and I would prefer to use up all the XVVs before officially defining any
CVVVs.

>>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,

That is not the sort of decision that the byfy should be making yet.

> 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.

They are part of the baselined language. It takes a formal vote on each
one to delete it, and I would protest such votes taking place in the
middle of the quite different task that the byfy is now engaged in of
trying to define the words.

For BAI, we should not need actual usage to define what the conversions
mean - that was precisely the argument that was made for regularizing
them. We need the examples before there will be usage.

And in the case of BAI, I think usage patterns here will be strongly
correlated with the native language of the speaker, so deleting things
based on nonusage when the language is dominated by English speakers and
one Spanish speaker strikes me as asking for bias.

>>Well, that's the kind of clarification I'm
>>after. Should
>>{du'o} be {fi'o djuno}, or something much
>>wider?

The baseline definition bases it on djuno. If someone wants to propose
a lujvo compound of djuno I could probably accept it, but I think we
need BAI for all of the djuno places.

>>>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.

It seems plausible without checking that the causals may currently not
be aligned with the other BAIs. They were included in the language
based on JCB, and merged with the others before people decided that they
wanted systematic meanings, and I may have required retention of the
old meaning for those as a condition for systematizing the others.
Since I suspect that the causals have NOT been used as much as I
expected based on the importance that they were in the TLI era, I would
accept a general realignment of the causals so that they match the other
BAIs.

However, if this means that we do NOT have the foursomes of
because/therefore/despite/nevertheless, then I will insist that a
solution be found for representing all 4 of those for each of the
causal-like BAI members.

> 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.

The causals had rules, but they may not be consistent with the evolved
gismu that they are based on (some of which were changed due to
sumti-raising concerns), and changes to negation might also render them
less fitting to the pattern.

I won't suggest the solution since I have not followed the debate and
can't without checking know the currently favored ways of negating a BAI
and the semantic import thereof (i.e. na'ebai vs bainai vs na bai). You
pc should be aware more than most of the history of JCBs causals that
led to the semantic foursome being associated with conversion and
negation of each causal. Just make sure that the result remains
consistent, and capable of expressing all the stuff that JCB had in mind.

lojbab