User:Jay Kominek

http://www.miranda.org/~jkominek/

Professional Research Assistant, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Got my B.Sc. in Computer Science, May 2002, University of Colorado at Boulder.

"Jay has a bad habit of responding to a question as though the question asked was actually the question the questioner wanted the answer to.  :-)" - Robin. (Quote added by Jay.)

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Somebody talk about me here, I tend to feel silly describing myself. :) --jay

You asked for it:

Jay Kominek, one of the New Growth Lojbanists, munificent provider of Lojbanic infrastructure including but not limited to this here FrontPage iki and the uzban site it is incorporated in, and proud jecrkolorado oloradan.

How'd I do? :-)

Woohoo. Though, I'm not much of a Coloradan. I can't handle the dry weather, and am in fact waiting for an opportunity to leave. (Which is now being delayed, by the death of the job market.)

I can be found on Lojban IRC at all kinds of strange times. Address me, and wait awhile. Feel free to talk at me as much as you please. I should see it within a day, and if I know your email address or you tell it to me, I'll respond. (nick is Taliesin).

And I'm perpetually annoyed at my inability to come up with a Lojbanization of my name which I find satisfactory. I'm tempted to simply make up something, ala what Robin Lee Powell amgusmis did.

For the record, I didn't make camgusmis up; it's a translation of the "meaning" of the name Robin, which is "bright fame". Or something. -- Robin Lee Powell amgusmis

For what it's worth, I liked djez -- mi'e nitcion

He's using it again, see Hamlet!

I got tired of not having settled on one, so, if its good enough for nitcion, its good enough for me! :)

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I'm waiting for the next pair of similarly named Lojbanists.

• Robin Turner and Robin Lee Powell
• Jay Kominek and jezrax ay Scott

• If you count a middle and a last name, try lidaniyl. ee Daniel Crocker and kreig.daniyl. raig Daniel
• Not very obviously, John Cowan and John Clifford aka pc.

• There was another, but I forgot to add it, and now I can't remember who it was.

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Since these pages are reference material, here is a quick reference guide to my positions on Lojban policy.

1. The grammar of the baseline is sacrosanct.

• • Its a nice and complete grammar sufficently complex and detailed to allow the expression of anything anyone should want to express. (See under Tinkering)
  • The number of programmers out there who have been mastering LALR(1) programming languages for years shows that humans can learn and process LALR(1) languages at high speed, even if the semantics are extensible and possibly infinite.

1. The semantics of existing documents should not be violated.

• • Otherwise why should anyone want to write anything? It might be declared nonsensical tomorrow, or even yesterday in the message you missed because your mail server was dropping email.

1. Tinkering isn't an appropriate use of Lojban

• • Why tinker with Lojban and try to force your changes upon others (when you never intend to use the language), when instead you could simply tinker with your own pet languages, and you'd never have to deal with anyone arguing with you? Much less stress...
  • There is no reason to believe there are things which Lojban can't express. Its easily as complex and rich as a natural language. Just because the construction you want isn't immediately obvious doesn't mean IMMINENT DEATH OF LOJBAN PREDICTED, NEWS AT 11. (Similarly, just because you can't duplicate the exact meaning of some pathological English phrase doesn't mean IMMINENT DEATH. There are always things in a language which are considered "untranslatable" or which lose something in the translation. Now if you're fluent, and you're thinking in Lojban, and you find yourself having problems expressing yourself while remaining in Lojban, you might be on to something.)

• • However, anyone can do anything they please as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. But if I felt that the tinkering harmed the language community...

1. Semantic exploration is a noble use of Lojban

• • This form of exploration is a worthy goal in any language, as it tends to expand ones mind. Unlike tinkering with the grammar, where you just change the set of rules that have to be memorized, semantic exploration has instant rewards.

1. Usage is the only real way to sway opinion.

• • Anyone arguing for <foo> while not using <foo> in their Lojban, or while not even using Lojban, is living in a state of sin, as far as I'm concerned. Further, their statements carry no weight with me.

1. Arguing about a topic, with the same people, as you've argued in the past is a waste of time.

• • Whenever you decide you want to argue about something you've argued before, just go read the mailing list archives and live vicariously through your previous arguments.

1. Doing something is more important than how perfect it is. (As long as it still conforms to the baseline!)

I find cultural gismu sort of inelegant, for rather hard to describe reasons. I advocate cultural fu'ivla, because I believe that they're a better long term solution, and because (in my interpretation of the reference grammar), the baseline allows them. Thus, unlike tsali asserts, lujvo based on cultural rafsi are, in my opinion, valid words. (And I think tsali would do well to explain why we're supposed to disregard the reference grammar on this point, rather than just shouting to the heavens, "they're not words, they're not words!")

• If you dislike cultural gismu, how does it follow that you like lujvo using the rafsi that come from the cultural gismu? --xod
  • Just because I use them doesn't mean I like doing it. If there isn't already a cultural fu'ivla on the list, I'm not going to try and make it. Chances are I don't know how that culture describes itself, and thus can't do it right. So for the time being, I'll use the cultural gismu. I was, after all, the person who put on the cultural fu'ivla page "Don't like cultural gismu? Want to junk all of them? First you'll need to have replacements" --jay