Re: zo djuno ce zo jetyju'o

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

Lojbab:
> >This is the mabla anti-malglico attitude rife in Lojban. Just because
> >English does things one way doesn't mean Lojban has to do them
> >differently.
>
> The anti malglico attitude stems from the recognition that so much of Lojban's
> design was done by English speakers, and if we can ENVISION an alternative
> to English's way of expressing things, we assume that any tendency to
> choose the English-like way is reflecting our bias.  We are afraid that
> failure to avoid such boas will lead to Lojban being merely a form of
> ecncoded English which will have little use that English does not already
 have.
> It would certainly reduce the potential for a Sapir/Whorf test (whereas
> always avoiding the English formulation would not, since the bias that
> results from any such decision is fairly random with regard to other
 languages)
>
> Furthermore, ther eis additional bias in that many people who are English
> speakers are drawn to Lojban because of the perceived illogicallity of
 English.
> Therefore they presume that going outside of English norms allows them to
> evaluate the logicality of their expression in itself, without the tendency to
> be drawn towards or away from a particular persepctive by its resemblance to
> a particular English formulation.

I very much agree with this explanation of the causes of
anti-malglicoism. It doesn't make me find anti-malglicoism any less
objectionable, of course, since to a great extent its causes seem to
be born of ignorance.

> >We just have two competing definitions of {djuno}. One, which is
> >different from but akin to English "know", and which has been clearly
> >articulated, and the other which Lojbab has been striving to
> >articulate with varying degrees of success.
> >
> >How do we choose between them? - e.g. if we are going to use {djuno},
> >which meaning will we intend it to have? Do we just ask Lojbab to
> >pronounce on the matter, and do our best to understand what his
> >pronouncements mean, and just swallow and accept it if they turn out
> >to be incoherent, or do we actually deliberate the issue, looking
> >at the intrinsic sensicality of the candidate meanings, and their
> >relationship to the meanings of other Lojban vocables?
>
> Well, having delinerated on the issue, we can just leave it undecided,
> with the discussion on the record and clear in everyone's minds, and maybe
> add in the lujvo required to distinguish the other if one is chosen
> (true-knolwedge and false-knowledge, if my version is chosen; no idea if
> otherwise).  Actual Lojban usage will then tend to conform toone or the other
> based on our perceptions of the merits of the cases.
>
> I think that my version is a superset of the other version, a more general
> form, and we have generally preferred to make gismu the most general yet sill
> meaningful forms possible.

Especially if this last para gets shown to be true, then I may well
end up agreeing that your version is preferable.

I would, though, first like to get a decent understanding of what
your version is, since sometimes when I think I have grasped it it
then seems to get contradicted by other things you say.

> >It's hard to cite without there being a reasonably comprehensive
> >corpus. There has, though, been enough usage for one to get a sense
> >of how people use certain words and grammatical features.
>
> There is enoughg to get a sense as to how Jorge and Goran use some words and
> features.  When we have 500 Jorges and Gorans and they all use the language
> the same way, then I will agree that we can know how "people" usae the words
> and features.  Not that Goran and Jorge are not persons, but the use of the
> mass term suggest that we are dealing with a large enough mass that
> individual idiosyncrasies are not to be suspected when we observe a pattern.

One can already, for example, observe a tendency to put the selbri in
second position between x1 and x2, to avoid FA, but to use {cumki
fa}. There are exceptions (e.g. Colin's selbri-last style), but these
seem marked.

--And.