Re: from the paper archives - pc on abstractors and tense

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

My criticism of {mue}/{puo}/{zahi}/{zuo} is only that the traditional
system of 4 situation types has been cast in stone by privileging
them with their own cmavo. The system is certainly useful descriptively,
but it is underlain by a different, simpler and more revealing system
- or so I think and so others think, even if people differ on the details
of their preferred analysis. The sensible thing to have done here would
be to have invented lujvo for {mue}/{puo}/{zahi}/{zuo}, which could be
used in a complex selbri with {nu}.

Given that, by the sound of things, tons of current lojban grammar
was of necessity virtually singlehandedly invented by Lojbab in the
late 1980s, with the support of pc and Nora and others, the overall
achievement is exceedingly admirable. But, as we can tell when someone
posts a proposal to lojban list nowadays, and the proposal is subjected
to intense scrutiny, and usually shot down, or at least modified,
some of those decisions could have been handled better. This is one of
them. But a solitary person working in relative isolation is bound
to make more mistakes than someone whose proposals are subjected to
intense scrutiny by a cohort of Seething Rationalist Types.

All of which is to say that while my admiration for lojban is tinged
with more adverse attitudes, my admiration for Lojbab and his fellow
workers is pure and complete. If to some extent my criticisms may be
felt to be rhetorically directed at Lojbab, they are directed at
him only qua defender of the feature in question, not qua its inventor.

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And