Settling disagreements on Lojban meanings

["61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!gilson!61510.decnet>]

"Mark E. Shoulson" <shoulson%CTR.COLUMBIA.EDU@pucc.PRINCETON.EDU> writes:

> ... Nick, Lojbab, and I have recently (off-line) had a similar
>discussion wrt the Lojban attitudinal "kau", which indicates knowledge.  I
>felt that using it within a subordinate clause it still refers to the
>speaker, not the actor in the clause, or at least that it was very unclear.
>Bob and Nick felt that it referred to the actor in the clause (at least in
>the case we were dealing with, where the sentence was something like "he
>knew that something (known!) ...")  Bob said that these things could be
>helped by using the "self-oriented" and "non-self-oriented" attitudinals,
>which are reserved for reference to the speaker.

Who decides in these cases? Lojbab, as president of LLG, has rank on you;
whether he chooses to pull rank is a separate question. Obviously, it could
be _defined_ either way. It's further complicated by the fact that Lojbab
states that he is not the inventor of Lojban and defers to JCB in that role,
insofar as Lojban is consciously intended to be a "realization of Loglan." I
get into that problem with Intal; the real authority would have to be Erich
Weferling, and if he were still alive, I'd certainly claim his word to be
final if there were a semantic or morphological question; but it seems that
with conlangs there _is_ in most cases an ultimate authority. With natlangs
(does that mean "natural" or "national"?) one can appeal to usage (even though
there may be disagreement as to _whose_ usage), but not in the case of Lojban
(are there any people who can put together a complete sentence in Lojban,
confident that it is correct without putting it through a parser?)

                                                    Bruce