Talk:Tiki forum archive/Forum 1/3765
Source: 2013 Tiki forum 1, thread #3765. Original authors, UTC times, post IDs, and reply-parent IDs are preserved. This is an archive, not an active article discussion.
The Quandary about xorlo
The Quandary about xorlo
pycyn · 2005-01-18 00:37 UTC · Tiki post #3765
For all I know, xorlo may be a highly desirable way to transform Lojban. It may solve many known or previously unknown problems in earlier Lojban and do so without introducing any new problems of its own. It may make Lojban as a language for use much smoother and moore elegant and transparent (and whatever other virtues you want here). For all I know. But all I know is what I read here (together with some recollections of discussions stretching back through several years). I have asked for more, making explicit requests, asking particular questions. But I have not received answers -- often none at all, occssionally inadequate ones that merely raised more questions. So what I am left with is what emerges here willy-nilly. And that comes down at the moment to a small number of points: 1) It is in xorlo easier to say "two groups of three broda each" and harder to say "two of the three broda," though the latter appears to be the more common expression and the former had a transparent expression before -- and of Zipfily appropriate size. 2) In xorlo the marking of opaque contexts is no longer obligatory as it was in older Lojban (at the risk of misspeaking). Whether this amounts to saying that there are no opaque contexts (as sometimes appears) or that we can tell which is meant from context with such a high level of success that the extra fillip is unnecessary is unclear. The first is clearly false; the second seems to be so, given how frequent the errors were when the marking was required. 3) To make xorlo a coherent system requires Mr. Potato-head or some equivalent -- to bridge the gap between opaque and transparent contexts if nothing else. But just what Mr. PH is or how it works is not clear in the beginning and has not been clarified since. We are just assure that it does work the way required. But there are two thoudnad years and more of philosophy and logic on the side that nothing does all this. To be sure, in most places what is said about Mr. PH fit known structures: batches, mereological sums, species -- but there is always a further step they cannot follow but that, we are told, Mr.H does. 4) On the side of elegance, all that has apperared so are a) that we don't need to worry about opaque contexts any more (which is nice because many of us never did get them right) and b) that a mass of improper Lojban (perhaps the greater part of what we have that has any claim to be Lojban) is proper xorlo. b is clearly the best argument so far for xorlo but does not seem to me to be enough, especially for something that calls itself a logical language (even if in a very restricted way). So, once again, will someone please lead me out of this quandary onto the side of xorlo, or, if that is impossible because the objections here are true, fix xorlo in some minimal way to avoid
the objections.
