Re: ni, jei, perfectionism

[JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

Lojbab:
>I just did a grep through various old texts (most more than 3 years old
>since I haven't extracted such texts from later mail).
>I did not find any instances of YOU Jorge using "jei" in perhaps 15 chunks
>of text.  Likewise not in several chunks of Goran's text.

Of course I don't use it. I discovered {le du'u xukau} fairly early in my
learning of Lojban.

>I found usages of jei in Nick's texts, several of which could be taken
>as pertaining to an indirect question,

The question is, did you find ANY that was not an indirect question?
My claim was that the little usage that {jei} had was as an indirect
questions.

>But I suspect that you will find that even here, if there was such
discussion,
>it occurred in one of the endless arcane discussions that were already
>happenming, and no one brought the issue to the attention of Cowan or me,
>so that we never became aware of it.

I certainly brought the issue to the attention of Cowan, since I'm sure
I mentioned it at the time I commented on the refgram drafts.

>This shows the weakness of such hypertechnical discussions.  They end up
>having an effect on the language ONLY of those who plow through them, and
>only then if they happen to agree as to the analysis.

That's your opinion. In my opinion many people started to use
{le du'u xukau} instead of {le jei} thanks to one of those discussions,
which happened in this case long before the baselining of the refgram.

>But in any case, it does not appear that there has been a lot of usage of
>jei in any form since the whole issue of indirect questions was raised.

Right. Perhaps that happened as a result of the discussion? {jei} becomes
practically useless if not used as an indirect question.

>It is possible that the final versions of Nick's text still contain
>jei as an indirect question because he did not agree with his critics'
>analysis, or because no one ever pointed out that jei was being used for
>an indirect question.

Nick's texts predate the discussion, I'm pretty sure. Indeed, most of
his texts predate my participation in the list.

co'o mi'e xorxes