WikiDiscuss

John Cowan wrote:
> Robert LeChevalier scripsit:
>
>
>>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.
>
>
> No, this was before my time and therefore before Nick's time too. It must
> have been some of the early students.

I checked the archives, and my memory was mostly correct. There were
key decisions in 1988 and 1991, with most of the ones I referred to made
in 1991. The 1988 decision (which allowed the use of converters on BAI
but was not systematic) was made collectively by Nora, pc, and me, as I
described in the following history at the time of the 1991 debates,
which led to the current design:
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00007.html
That basically describes how BAI was created as an amalgam of multiple
selma'o, and it notes how unsystematically we had been about using
converters with BAI up till 1991, though usage had tended to point the
BAI members closer to the gismu that were associated with them.

At the same time, there was a private discussion between Jim Carter and
me, reported by jimc here:
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00037.html

I included the issue in a series of messages on cmavo dated 11 Jun 1991,
of which the key one is here
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00045.html
This includes some of Cowan's writing on ci'a (I'm sure there is more,
but I didn't look), and contained the essential nature of current BAI as
a quasi-abbreviation for a FIhO construct.

Chassell commented here:
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00051.html
and summarized things in this message (which is garbaged up)
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00052.html
and he then extended his remarks with the following
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00060.html
which I think was the first generalization of the idea that BAI adds
places to the place structure.

I commented at
http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00081.html

I also mentioned in my multipart post consulting with pc, who had done a
review of a book on case tags for us, and thus I am pretty sure that pc
was involved in the discussion at the time, albeit by telephone rather
than online, and of course he was involved in the earlier decision which
created BAI.

http://balance.wiw.org/~jkominek/lojban/9106/msg00091.html
is my discussion about Lojban BAI and case tags

I think some of this discussion in those ancient messages put things a
little more clearly than I did in my off-the-cuff history the other
night. Whether it enlightens any of the current discussion, I will
leave to you-all to decide.

lojbab