CLL and modern Lojban

[suke...@gmail.com]

coi

I recently stumbled upon a document (le teris...) which was in declined in two versions: "CLL Lojban" and "modern Lojban". I don't understand why.

• What is the status of "modern Lojban"? Is it a kind of beta / pre-release / proposal? Or is there a schism / fork, were a group prefer one version over the other?
• What are (in a few words) the differences between the two? Why choose one or another?
  
• Where is the reference documentation of "modern Lojban"?

.i ki'e ro do

.i co'o

[guskant]

Le dimanche 5 novembre 2017 10:01:39 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

coi

coi do

 

I recently stumbled upon a document (le teris...) which was in declined in two versions: "CLL Lojban" and "modern Lojban". I don't understand why.

• What is the status of "modern Lojban"? Is it a kind of beta / pre-release / proposal? Or is there a schism / fork, were a group prefer one version over the other?

"Modern Lojban" is some versions of dialects that are used by some people who thinks their own dialects are the modern Lojban, and the others' dialects are not. Here is my "accusation" against the situation.

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/The_egocentrism_of_a_Lojban_community

As for the newer one among the texts of {teris}, however, not only their "modern Lojban" but also my dialect regards it as grammatical.

I don't call their dialects "beta" or "pre-release", but they are a group of proposals in any case. There is a schism of Lojban speakers according to preference of dialects, and I created a documentary film about it last year:

https://vimeo.com/190637628

 

• What are (in a few words) the differences between the two? Why choose one or another?
  

Some of the differences are already described in the documentary film above.

I choose neither their "modern Lojban" nor the CLL's, but mine, which I call "Zantufa", because I prefer it. I don't care what the others choose. Some people choose "modern Lojban", and some others persist in the CLL Lojban.

 

• Where is the reference documentation of "modern Lojban"?

Unfortunately, I don't find any comprehensive document about their "modern Lojban". As for my dialect, here is the one:

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zantufa

 

.i ki'e ro do

.i co'o

je'e ui do

mi'e la guskant

 

[solpahi]

It is not clear what "modern Lojban" is, but it is clear what it is not
(for example, it is *not* the Lojban described in the CLL).

As for what it *is*, there is no clear definition and there probably
can't be until all the different ways people speak form a coherent
dialect that people more or less agree on (which might never happen).

CLL vs "modern Lojban" is a false dichotomy. There are several clearly
distinguishable modern (i.e., not 20 years old) "dialects", some of them
are documented, in part or in full, and many are not. What is clear,
however, is that people don't want to use CLL Lojban (despite the fact
that it is still the most thoroughly documented version). If you learn a
bit more about Lojban and get familiar with its details, you will most
likely begin to understand why. The different dialects are just an
expression of that desire, and a manifestation of the differences in how
different people think a better version should look like.


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[Thomas Porter]

 >What is clear, however, is that people don't want to use CLL Lojban (despite the fact 

>that it is still the most thoroughly documented version). If you learn a bit more about Lojban and >get familiar with its details, you will most likely begin to understand why.

I am one of the most vocal proponents of CLL-only Lojban, but the problem is that the documentation is poorly organized and poorly explained. After, what?, a decade, the Complete Lojban Language still has not had the full Errata approved for publication, so new learners are forced to either navigate outdated websites for complete information or to learn instead a Lojban-ido.

On top of that, official leadership and activity in the community is lacking. It is nearly impossible to have one's opinion acknowledged unless you are in one of the small and inaccessible cliques that seem to be the source of the off-shoot dialects.

[suke...@gmail.com]

Wow. This is even worse than I thought.

One great thing about Lojban is that it is supposed to be unique. What I read here is like if people said "Hey, I invented a Lojban-French", and "Me, a Lojban-Chinese", and "Lojban-English"... That sounds so stupid.

Let me be clear: I'm NOT judging anyone forking Lojban. Surely they had good reasons to do so. Actually nobody can pretend forseeing any case, and write an "immutable" language. So yes, it is obvious that the language evolves and will evolve, even an hypothetic "official an unique" Lojban.

What is unfortunate is that all forking work should be reintegrated in some way to the "trunk", or else we'll end up with many "Lojbans" wich will actually kill Lojban (whatever version).

I understand the lack of leadership, but it feels more like a lack of structures for democraty. It would be nice to have such structures, but unfortunately I don't know how this could be initiated. One idea would be to mimic software, a bit as OpenGL did, having the core, extensions, and proposals.

To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

[suke...@gmail.com]

... or maybe meritocraty-democraty or any adapted stuff.

[Stela Selckiku]

The main problem with coming to a democratic agreement about Lojban is, who should participate in that democracy? Lojban has a tiny number of fluent speakers, overwhelmed by a much larger community of non-speakers. Any sort of process whose participants were the community broadly would probably be inclined to reach decisions like, "We think it would be a good idea to just speak the way it says in the book and not change anything!" But from the perspective of people who actually speak Lojban, the book was just a theoretical proposal and there's practical reasons why it can't all be implemented exactly as written. 

It's not actually a large enough community to form "dialects" in the ordinary sense. All of the fluent speakers understand one another. But because Lojban is more precisely defined than most languages, we can make formal distinctions between ways of speaking that in another language community would just be ignored as the incomprehensible complexities of language. If you make a change to English grammar, nobody necessarily even exactly understands how the change works, because no one understands how English works, because language. If you make a change to Lojban you can precisely document it and then you can have a special parser that understands that amended grammar. In other words being able to formalize the grammar makes changes more evident by making it easy to document them. The semantics of the base words has also been changing over the years, but because there's no formalization of those meanings you can't so easily tell it's happening. 

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[Michael Turniansky]

  Well, I for one  am annoyed.  While I wrote the original, in CLL lojban, and I CC-BY'ed it, this so-called "modern lojban" version I abjure and want no part of.  Because it looks like from the webpage that I created that version.  I did not, and there is no "credit" (read "blame") for the person who actually did the translating into so-called "modern lojban".  So if the person who did that would kindly attach their own name as the translator, I'd appreciate it.

              --Michael "gejyspa" Turniansky

[guskant]

Le dimanche 5 novembre 2017 21:17:00 UTC, gejyspa a écrit :

  Well, I for one  am annoyed.  While I wrote the original, in CLL lojban, and I CC-BY'ed it, this so-called "modern lojban" version I abjure and want no part of.  Because it looks like from the webpage that I created that version.  I did not, and there is no "credit" (read "blame") for the person who actually did the translating into so-called "modern lojban".  So if the person who did that would kindly attach their own name as the translator, I'd appreciate it.

              --Michael "gejyspa" Turniansky

doi .i'i la gejyspa

That's very bad violation of your copyright. I have been deceived by the phrase {i la .maikl. turniianskis. di'e finti gi'e fanva} in the "modern Lojban" version of the text. You made the original text attributed to CC-BY-NC, then the "modern Lojban" version must have contained a notice about the modification and a link to the original version, though actually it is not treated in that way. 

mi'e la guskant 

[Jonathan Jones]

The CLL version has a link to the "modern" one, actually.

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mu'o mi'e .aionys.

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[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la stela selckiku

You're absolutely right about saying that's an issue finding a "democratic" way or such. I guess applying a "standard" democraty here isn't a good idea of course ; it must be adapted to the situation.

My (rough) idea is that people making decisions about Lojban must, at least, have significant knowledge of what they're talking about (This is clearly not my case, as I'm not fluent!). But this group ("committee"?) should accept the fact that language will evolve, whether they like it or not. I guess this idea is already spread and accepted, but I'm not 100% sure.

My (strictly personal) point of view is the same as yours : there are practical reasons that make evolution unavoidable. Other people (ie. "non-committee") should then be able to make proposals, run debates, and so on.

So, paraphrasing, here are some rules suggestions (to be debated!):

• What is "core" language has to be determined and be clearly stated.
• Reintegration of proposals to the "core" should be reviewed, fixed, and adapted by a "core committee" (Which size? ~10 to 50 people?).
  
• Being a member of such organization should be restricted to "meritant" people. Of course, "merit" needs to be defined (knowledge? previous work? fluency? all three?).
• Voting may also be slightly weighted with "merit".
• Proposals may be done by anyone. They may be "supported" by anyone (kind of "+1" vote), in order to put presure on the committee.
  

Is it even possible to get to that? It requires both willings and structures...

As for the first point (define what is "core"), I must say I personally was completely lost when I started studying. It is only because of answers in this thread that I discovered why.

It felt like anything was a bit fuzzy... except for the (outdated?) CLL. So I (naively) started with the CLL, which looked like "the" official reference.

@gejyspa: Thanks for clarification. I'm sorry for you.

la .sukender.

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[mezohe]

2017-11-05 22:16 Michael Turniansky:

> Well, I for one am annoyed. While I wrote the original, in CLL lojban,
> and I CC-BY'ed it, this so-called "modern lojban" version I abjure and want
> no part of. Because it looks like from the webpage that I created that
> version. I did not, and there is no "credit" (read "blame") for the person
> who actually did the translating into so-called "modern lojban". So if the
> person who did that would kindly attach their own name as the translator,
> I'd appreciate it.
>
> --Michael "gejyspa" Turniansky
>
>

Apologies, I'm the cuplrit. I've added my name and made the top banner
slightly less deceptive.

mi'e la me zo'e ku no'u la cirko

[suke...@gmail.com]

Thanks for him. And thanks for me, because you pointed out a very interesting thing about language variants! ;-)

la .sykyndyr.  (wrong spelling in previous post, my bad!)

[Jonathan Jones]

On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 11:00 PM, <suke...@gmail.com> wrote:

doi la stela selckiku

You're absolutely right about saying that's an issue finding a "democratic" way or such. I guess applying a "standard" democraty here isn't a good idea of course ; it must be adapted to the situation.

My (rough) idea is that people making decisions about Lojban must, at least, have significant knowledge of what they're talking about (This is clearly not my case, as I'm not fluent!). But this group ("committee"?) should accept the fact that language will evolve, whether they like it or not. I guess this idea is already spread and accepted, but I'm not 100% sure.

My (strictly personal) point of view is the same as yours : there are practical reasons that make evolution unavoidable. Other people (ie. "non-committee") should then be able to make proposals, run debates, and so on.

So, paraphrasing, here are some rules suggestions (to be debated!):

• What is "core" language has to be determined and be clearly stated.
• Reintegration of proposals to the "core" should be reviewed, fixed, and adapted by a "core committee" (Which size? ~10 to 50 people?).
  
• Being a member of such organization should be restricted to "meritant" people. Of course, "merit" needs to be defined (knowledge? previous work? fluency? all three?).
• Voting may also be slightly weighted with "merit".
• Proposals may be done by anyone. They may be "supported" by anyone (kind of "+1" vote), in order to put presure on the committee.
  

Is it even possible to get to that? It requires both willings and structures...

As for the first point (define what is "core"), I must say I personally was completely lost when I started studying. It is only because of answers in this thread that I discovered why.

It felt like anything was a bit fuzzy... except for the (outdated?) CLL. So I (naively) started with the CLL, which looked like "the" official reference.

@gejyspa: Thanks for clarification. I'm sorry for you.

la .sukender.

That is literally what the BPFK is for. And CLL is the official Lojban, notwithstanding the very few proposals that have been accepted since it's publication.

The current CLL is mostly just an update to the original to make it easier to publish and use modern technologies to make it easy to update, plus fixing typographical and grammatical errors. (That's why it's called CLL v1.1, IIRC.)

Eventually, the CLL will be updated to include the changes since first publication, that project is known as CLL v2, and I'm certain Robin would love help with working on that.

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .aionys.

.i ki'e u'ucru'e mi punai djuno fe la .byfy.

I must say I did not read enough through the various pages to reach that info.

Anyway, if you say the BPFK works as I described, then I feel it's good news. However:

• From afar, CLL seems a bit "stuck" at 1.1. Am I right? Do you think there would be some 1.x before 2.0 (ie. minor updates)?
  
• As I said on #ckule (IRC), it might be a good idea to write on the front page the version of the CLL and its release date ;-)
• Are some "betas" / "working branches" available (or will be available), so that people get a chance to have a look at before the official release?
  
• Do you have in mind any plausible releases dates? I'm not asking for a contractual thing, of course! Just to have a vague idea in mind.

Aside from that, and from my novice point of view, it seems that forks do exist and seem significant. Isn't it a signal, asking for more updates in the official CLL? Or do you feel that some people forking are simply impatient having their proposals integrated? What is your point of view?

la .sykyndyr.

.i mi kamjunmre mi fi la .lojban. me'a lu .abu. pa li'u le ropno bangu bo manri

.i ganai la .lojban. pe mi toldra gi e'o o'anai ko dragau

(I self-evaluate my Lojban level as being less than A1, as for the CEFR. Please correct my Lojban if I'm wrong!)

[Michael Turniansky]

  Thank you.

   I mean, I'm no Shakespeare, but if one translated his stuff into 21st century vernacular, and no other name other than his appeared on the front cover, he'd probably be annoyed, too.

   :-)

   And sukender, thanks for bringing the matter to my attention. I had no idea.

              --gejyspa

 

[gleki.is...@gmail.com]

Em domingo, 5 de novembro de 2017 13:01:39 UTC+3, Benoit Neil escreveu:

coi

I recently stumbled upon a document (le teris...) which was in declined in two versions: "CLL Lojban" and "modern Lojban". I don't understand why.

• What is the status of "modern Lojban"? Is it a kind of beta / pre-release / proposal? Or is there a schism / fork, were a group prefer one version over the other?

This is a long standing issue. As shanoxilt once correctly noted Lojban was hijacked by a clique of so called fluent speakers.

They started forking never completing any printed documentation of they were doing. Firs they change the meaning of the particle {lo}, then tried to implement other changes including even the formal grammar.

When people try to speak to fluent speakers they are immediately faced with these discprepancies between The Complete Lojban Language book and views of particular people. You can imagine all the negative consequences of this situation.

But in spite of deterioration of Lojban community and its inability to produce any fruitful results still Lojban is pretty much how The Complete Lojban Language describes it.

E.g. learning a revised meaning {lo} is no big deal.

[guskant]

Le lundi 6 novembre 2017 09:32:10 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

doi la .aionys.

.i ki'e u'ucru'e mi punai djuno fe la .byfy.

I must say I did not read enough through the various pages to reach that info.

Anyway, if you say the BPFK works as I described, then I feel it's good news. However:

• From afar, CLL seems a bit "stuck" at 1.1. Am I right? Do you think there would be some 1.x before 2.0 (ie. minor updates)?
  

You will find issues for CLL 1.2 here:

https://github.com/lojban/cll/milestone/12

The issues were already discussed by past lojbanists, and Cirko worked on introducing them into the next version of CLL. Gleki asked BPFK members for approval of them, and no one responded:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bpfk-list/jqVDF5z9LqA

I, as a member of BPFK, am responsible for approving them, but I did not have enough time for that. Even if I have time for that, I can't imagine that I can approve any English texts written by an native English speaker because I'm very poor at English.

You can freely approve them even if you are not a member of BPFK. If you want to do it as a member of BPFK, just post a message in Lojban to "bpfk-list" Google Group at the URL above, saying that you want to be a member, and you will be admitted.

• As I said on #ckule (IRC), it might be a good idea to write on the front page the version of the CLL and its release date ;-)

I agree.

 

• Are some "betas" / "working branches" available (or will be available), so that people get a chance to have a look at before the official release?
  
• Do you have in mind any plausible releases dates? I'm not asking for a contractual thing, of course! Just to have a vague idea in mind.

You should find many branches at the github repository above. I have never contributed to the repository for some reasons:

- the repository is governed by "the Lojban Coders' Group". I regard it as a kind of unofficial fans' group. Although the Group owns many official or pre-official contents, the owner(s) and the contributors are not equal to the members of BPFK or LLG. I am a member of BPFK and LLG, and I have never invited as a collaborator or an owner of the group. I once made a small pull request to another repository of the group, but it was ignored for almost one year.

- I made some efforts on bpfk-list to remove grammatical difficulties or important logical defects, but we had always a stubborn defender of the current state. You can find such discussions with no conclusion in the bpfk-list Google Group above. Consequently, I have lost hope in updating CLL, and shifted myself to create a large personal commentary on the whole CLL ver.1.1.

 

Aside from that, and from my novice point of view, it seems that forks do exist and seem significant. Isn't it a signal, asking for more updates in the official CLL? Or do you feel that some people forking are simply impatient having their proposals integrated? What is your point of view?

la .sykyndyr.

.i mi kamjunmre mi fi la .lojban. me'a lu .abu. pa li'u le ropno bangu bo manri

lo'ai fi sa'ai fu le'ai ie pei 

i ji'a e'u lo'ai me'a lu .abu. pa li'u sa'ai li .abu pi'e pa le'ai ie pei

 

.i ganai la .lojban. pe mi toldra gi e'o o'anai ko dragau

(I self-evaluate my Lojban level as being less than A1, as for the CEFR. Please correct my Lojban if I'm wrong!)

i na'i ma'i mi na'e toldra i po'o .au sajgau do lo xauzma be fi mi

mi'e la guskant

[suke...@gmail.com]

[side note: I'll answer {la guskant} when I will have read the answer and links ;-) ]

Thank you for that historical answer, Gleki.

Yes, I perfectly understand the huge damage it can cause.

Nevertheless, I also understand why this may arise: I never saw a set of rules accepted by 100% of people!

• Laws? There are plenty of debates. Countries have different ones. People disagree on many, but also often agree on core ones.
  
• Coding style rules? There are as many guidelines as coders! However, enforcing the whole developer team to use them makes teamwork more effective. They're like a common language.
  
• Language rules? Phew! Everyone knows someone who has his/her "very own" way to spell words, or organize sentences...
  

For the sake of Lojban's survival and spreading (and despite my very short history on that language), I think all must agree on some unique version, and accept the debate to make it evolve, and accept that not all proposals will fit in, and that reintegration of proposals may take months or years.

Said otherwise, we must all "agree to disagree", may I say...

By the way, your answer makes me think about software distributions. Do we want our future GNU-Linux / Android / iOS / Windows / BSD / whatever contain a lot of "jbo_*" (imagine "jbo_FR", "jbo_EN", "jbo_CA"...), or just a unique "jbo" language?

Unicity of Lojban is, IMHO, vital. I personally would just drop learning Lojban if I had no hope of that.

Thanks again.

la .sykyndyr.

[guskant]

Le lundi 6 novembre 2017 13:41:43 UTC, guskant a écrit :

lo'ai fi sa'ai fu le'ai ie pei 

i ji'a e'u lo'ai me'a lu .abu. pa li'u sa'ai li .abu pi'e pa le'ai ie pei

 

u'u ei lu'ei lo'ai fi sa'ai fo le'ai ie pei li'au oi se'i

mi'e la guskant

[MorphemeAddict]

sykynder: Your examples of names of Lojban dialects lead me to think that you think the so-called dialects of Lojban are based on adaptations to specific natlangs. Based on my years of minor involvement with Lojban, the differences all have to do with better (pick your own definition if you want) and more consistent implementation of logic, pragmatics, and meaning, never on what natlangs do. 

stevo

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em segunda-feira, 6 de novembro de 2017, <suke...@gmail.com> escreveu:

[side note: I'll answer {la guskant} when I will have read the answer and links ;-) ]

Thank you for that historical answer, Gleki.

Yes, I perfectly understand the huge damage it can cause.

Nevertheless, I also understand why this may arise: I never saw a set of rules accepted by 100% of people!

• Laws? There are plenty of debates. Countries have different ones. People disagree on many, but also often agree on core ones.
  
• Coding style rules? There are as many guidelines as coders! However, enforcing the whole developer team to use them makes teamwork more effective. They're like a common language.
  
• Language rules? Phew! Everyone knows someone who has his/her "very own" way to spell words, or organize sentences...
  

For the sake of Lojban's survival and spreading (and despite my very short history on that language), I think all must agree on some unique version, and accept the debate to make it evolve, and accept that not all proposals will fit in, and that reintegration of proposals may take months or years.

As you can see this is unlikely to happen since people like to fork but...

you have CLL. It contains all the rules needed and makes the language functional.

If you read it all and say "I want to speak something else " that's okay. For now there is no document like this book in the amount of information introduced for a speakable logical language.

Lojban is not in someone's head. It's been put on paper.

 

Said otherwise, we must all "agree to disagree", may I say...

By the way, your answer makes me think about software distributions. Do we want our future GNU-Linux / Android / iOS / Windows / BSD / whatever contain a lot of "jbo_*" (imagine "jbo_FR", "jbo_EN", "jbo_CA"...), or just a unique "jbo" language?

Unicity of Lojban is, IMHO, vital. I personally would just drop learning Lojban if I had no hope of that.

Thanks again.

la .sykyndyr.

Le lundi 6 novembre 2017 14:10:44 UTC+1, Gleki Arxokuna a écrit :

This is a long standing issue. As shanoxilt once correctly noted Lojban was hijacked by a clique of so called fluent speakers.

They started forking never completing any printed documentation of they were doing. Firs they change the meaning of the particle {lo}, then tried to implement other changes including even the formal grammar.

When people try to speak to fluent speakers they are immediately faced with these discprepancies between The Complete Lojban Language book and views of particular people. You can imagine all the negative consequences of this situation.

But in spite of deterioration of Lojban community and its inability to produce any fruitful results still Lojban is pretty much how The Complete Lojban Language describes it.

E.g. learning a revised meaning {lo} is no big deal.

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[John E Clifford]

"Lojban: the language where no one ever knows whether what he says is grammatical, and,if it is, whether it means what he intended." is apparently even more true now than it was nearly 30 years ago when it was first proposed. Even monoparsing, basically the only reason for Lojban's existence, is more in doubt now than it was even back in the early days of CLL (well, getting the right parse, at least; getting a unique one is easy). All the Baroque excrescences on the simple system JCB tossed away 60+ years ago seem to have done the opposite of helping.  And clearly learning Lojban has not helped to make people more rational or logical or even sensible.

pycyn

 

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[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la stevo

Sure, you're right, but this was only because I was not sure people would understand my idea with "jbo_AA", "jbo_XX", "jbo_WATEVER" :-)

Thanks for adding the precision.

la .sykynder.

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[suke...@gmail.com]

@Gleki: What you wrote is roughly what as I, as a rookie, found: the CLL is what seems most complete. This is also why I asked for other references (and still asking!). As I said, I'm not against forking. I feel like this is not an issue, as long as people are willing to try reintegrate their work to the core language. But this requires compromise & accommodation on both sides, and evaluating if a reintegration is worth the job is already a job. And even if many Lojbanists are enthusiasts, they all need money to live and cannot work for free indefinitely.

I just don't want to spend time learning things if they would be thrown away in a few months/years, or if this dilutes a fragile project.

la .sykyndyr.

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .guskant.

Thanks for the links. That seems interesting, but I just can't read big Lojban discussions: it took me days (yeah, from time to time, not continuously!) to read and understand 100% of this famous "la .teris."!

My current level is one of the reasons why I'm absolutely not ready to enter any board or committee.

Is there an HTML version somewhere so that everyone can access it without developer tools?

* Paralysis *

So, according to what you say, BPFK is really paralyzed. When you want to rely on someone's work, well, (s)he might simply be overloaded with other tasks and may never answer. It seems that there are no "replacement" guys/gals: if one is not able to perform a task, whatever the reason, then nobody can replace him/her. Do you think so too?

It feels so dramatic to me that you've lost hope. It is exactly what I feared: anyone can do whatever, in whatever direction. That's freedom. That's not wrong in itself. But... nothing more? Ideas create "explosions" and there is no structure at all to make all of this collapse to something better and organized?

You told your efforts were blocked by some people. Were there discussions (I mean enough discussions)? Voting? Enough participants in voting? Enough time for the committee to work on proposals?

• If so, maybe there is something to do with structures (as said above)?
  
• If not, maybe all committee members should accept the fact that language will evolve?
  

* Funds *

As I just told to Gleki : "even if many Lojbanists are enthusiasts, they all need money to live and cannot work for free indefinitely".

You know, some guy on the Facebook group (Сергей Ильинских) asked if "crypto-currency rewards" could be an idea for translations jobs. At first I thought this was not very useful, and surely complex to set up. However, I feel now that the idea behind this (money to encourage people working on Lojban stuff) may be one of the "energy sources" that would change the game. Of course, this has to be very carefully handled! But we may imagine something like periodic small fund raising (donations, crowdfunding, etc.) on one hand, and a system putting clear (and small) objectives and rewards on the other hand. I feel like the idea has to be enhanced and discussed... But don't you think it is worth debating on this? This of course would be only some tools to help, and the current organizations would still be there and help.

* Organizations *

An by the way, this thread highlighted the fact that there are 3 "major" groups down there: LLG, GPFK, and the Coders Group. Even if history may explain why there are three, the current "freezing" status of all may be a signal for changing things. I don't know even 1% of what each did; but FROM AFAR, it seems that all organizations share some common interests, and may perform better together. Of course, merging everyone into a single entity is surely fictional. But they may organize as "subsidiary companies", sharing a purely administrative section with some functional parts (ex: financial as for the previous topic, rule sets, etc.). Do you feel this would be technically possible? And would this be desirable and profitable?

I thought about this overnight (!) and specifically about one rule: as people discuss about language, is it wise to allow discussions to be in Lojban only? Maybe a common rule of requiring a (rough?) translation in another "reference" language would help. Of course, as there are plenty of materials in English out there, it seems logical that this would be English, but that's not mandatory, I guess.

You known, I'm willing to help but I can only help organizing stuff, and spreading the word. Not much more because of my too recent implication.

* [side note] *

Thank you very much for helping me improving my skills.

• "li .abu pi'e pa" is just a great idea! I didn't know how to convert the "A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2" levels, so I used a basic "translation". But putting as if it was a number "A dot 1" of unspecified base is awesome!
  
• But what about the "less than"? Can I write "me'i li .abu pi'e pa"?
  
• My bad about "fo" (and not "fi"): I was counting "fa" from x2 instead of x1, as for "se" (because there is no "x1 <-> x1" swapping cmavo), so I had an offset of 1. I mixed up counting rules!
  
• Note : I thought "me'a..." was a sumti place, but parser told me it's a modal. So I guess I cannot use it, or else "le ropno bangu bo manri" would fall in m3 place (units) of "kamjunmre".
• Finally, your last sentence is too obscure for my level! What I understand: "One cannot say `I'm never wrong`. I can only wish (???)".

ki'ecai

la .sykyndyr.

Le lundi 6 novembre 2017 14:41:43 UTC+1, guskant a écrit :

You will find issues for CLL 1.2 here:

https://github.com/lojban/cll/milestone/12

The issues were already discussed by past lojbanists, and Cirko worked on introducing them into the next version of CLL. Gleki asked BPFK members for approval of them, and no one responded:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bpfk-list/jqVDF5z9LqA

I, as a member of BPFK, am responsible for approving them, but I did not have enough time for that. Even if I have time for that, I can't imagine that I can approve any English texts written by an native English speaker because I'm very poor at English.

You can freely approve them even if you are not a member of BPFK. If you want to do it as a member of BPFK, just post a message in Lojban to "bpfk-list" Google Group at the URL above, saying that you want to be a member, and you will be admitted.

You should find many branches at the github repository above. I have never contributed to the repository for some reasons:

- the repository is governed by "the Lojban Coders' Group". I regard it as a kind of unofficial fans' group. Although the Group owns many official or pre-official contents, the owner(s) and the contributors are not equal to the members of BPFK or LLG. I am a member of BPFK and LLG, and I have never invited as a collaborator or an owner of the group. I once made a small pull request to another repository of the group, but it was ignored for almost one year.

- I made some efforts on bpfk-list to remove grammatical difficulties or important logical defects, but we had always a stubborn defender of the current state. You can find such discussions with no conclusion in the bpfk-list Google Group above. Consequently, I have lost hope in updating CLL, and shifted myself to create a large personal commentary on the whole CLL ver.1.1.

lo'ai fi sa'ai fu le'ai ie pei 

i ji'a e'u lo'ai me'a lu .abu. pa li'u sa'ai li .abu pi'e pa le'ai ie pei

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .pycyn.

You seem rather bitter about the current situation. Am I right?

What is your position about it? Could you imagine something to "fix" the situation?

Thanks.

la .sykyndyr.

[MorphemeAddict]

sykynder: You mention re-integrating forks back into the core language. How do you change something and then make it the same as it was before? And why would you want to? 

 

stevo

Virus-free. www.avast.com

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[suke...@gmail.com]

@stevo: Sorry I don't understand the "make it the same as it was before". From my point of view:

• Establishing language rules "forever" is not possible. Therefore some changes will be necessary. This is what called "evolution".
• Forking may be interesting. It may be an pure experiment, a "feature branch", a fix, etc.
• Reintegrating a branch to the core actually changes the core! This is why it must be done very carefully, in order to not break initial intents of the language.

I hope I mad myself clearer :-)

[John E Clifford]

Not bitter, merely dismayed and very sad.  40 years ago Logjam seemed to have great promise, but (as I later found) it had already spent its promise and, despite years fiddling and a couple of almost total restarts, has only gotten further and further from its goal (monoparsing possibly aside).  The only real fix I can conceive is to junk everything you have now (except as a pile of spare parts, some of which may eventually be of use) and go back to square one, with a a higher order intensional logic rather than FOPL and a careful, step by step construction by reversable transformations.  Good luck with any phase of that plan.

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[Timothy Lawrence]

"You can learn the language described here with assurance that it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters."
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

I only use CLL Lojban. I believe that an unambiguous language needs to have a central, singular version to stay unambiguous.

I don't know much about the history of OpenGL but it, from a surface level, seems similar to the history of C++, which I am familiar with.
By and large, new features are added to the C++ language, but every version is backwards-compatible with older versions (and almost entirely compatible with its predecessor, C).
An older compiler might choke on new language features, but a new compiler will always work with old code.

Compiler vendors may introduce their own language features as forks (and they are not considered standard C++), but there is always a standard/"strict" mode that can be enabled. Most good features that compilers introduce have been added to the official version, perhaps changed in a way to integrate them better.

This is what I think Lojban should be like.

I want all new / official Lojban versions to be CLL-compatible.

> "jbo_*" (imagine "jbo_FR", "jbo_EN", "jbo_CA"...),

I do not want there to be "jbo_A", "jbo_B", "jbo_C"... that are all incompatible.

I do want "jbo_1", "jbo_2", "jbo_3"..., where it's a sequential chronology and each is a more improved (but backwards-compatible) version.

A tool could explicitly support "jbo_2" and it would implicitly support "jbo_1". If a tool just says it supports "jbo", it would be presumed to support the latest.

> But this group ("committee"?) should accept the fact that language will evolve, whether they like it or not.

I hope that this means that they accept the language can change, by backwards-compatible design and not evolution via drift.

C++ does not at all "evolve" like a natural language and I don't think Lojban should, either. Because C++ has maintained a centralised standard and continued to update, I think it possible for Lojban to do so.



> What is clear, however, is that people don't want to use CLL Lojban (despite the fact that it is still the most thoroughly documented version).

I do. I think most people want to use the latest version of something. I see the CLL Lojban as the latest version, for the backwards-compatibility reasons mentioned above.

I have seen CLL-incompatible versions advertised on the website and new learners are likely to intuit that it's intrinsically better to choose the "latest version", not knowing that learning the modern versions entails embracing a schism.

> To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

This is so true for me, and one of the reasons that I became more quiet (although I am writing an unannounced novel that contains CLL Lojban).

> I just don't want to spend time learning things if they would be thrown away in a few months/years

> sykynder: You mention re-integrating forks back into the core language. How do you change something and then make it the same as it was before?

I believe all official Lojban changes must be backwards-compatible for Lojban to succeed in its goal of being unambiguous (let alone succeed in other ways, such as adoption).

> E.g. learning a revised meaning {lo} is no big deal.

It's not just about learning, it's about effort invested in writing tools, texts, chatbots and parsers (et cetera).
It's about breaking that promise in the CLL that the language will not be subject to further fiddling.

Introducing changes that break Lojban compatibility will
- waste invested time in the older version
- waste invested money in buying the older CLL (etc)
- alienate those who wasted their time/money
- introduce more ambiguity (The Lojban version changes the meaning!!)

(Why did CLL-{le} become modern-{lo} and the modern-{le} get introduced, instead of just introducing the new {lo} to mean what modern-{le} means and keeping CLL-{le} as the default?)

As learning a revised meaning is no big deal, simply redoing these changes to be compatible with CLL Lojban should be no big deal ;)



"Lojban does not yet have nearly the vocabulary it needs to be a fully usable language of the modern world"
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

If we can agree to move forward using CLL Lojban and only make backwards-compatible changes, then I can personally say I'll be happy to resume devoting time, energy and money into Lojban. Lojban's usefulness as an unambiguous language is so important to me.

It doesn't have to be "perfect" or "better", it just has to be unambiguous and complete.


I want to help complete Lojban, and any processes of governance surrounding it, to reunite it.

Thanks for reading,

mi'e la timoteios.

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of suke...@gmail.com <suke...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 6 November 2017 6:04 AM
To: lojban
Subject: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

 

Wow. This is even worse than I thought.

One great thing about Lojban is that it is supposed to be unique. What I read here is like if people said "Hey, I invented a Lojban-French", and "Me, a Lojban-Chinese", and "Lojban-English"... That sounds so stupid.

Let me be clear: I'm NOT judging anyone forking Lojban. Surely they had good reasons to do so. Actually nobody can pretend forseeing any case, and write an "immutable" language. So yes, it is obvious that the language evolves and will evolve, even an hypothetic "official an unique" Lojban.

What is unfortunate is that all forking work should be reintegrated in some way to the "trunk", or else we'll end up with many "Lojbans" wich will actually kill Lojban (whatever version).

I understand the lack of leadership, but it feels more like a lack of structures for democraty. It would be nice to have such structures, but unfortunately I don't know how this could be initiated. One idea would be to mimic software, a bit as OpenGL did, having the core, extensions, and proposals.

To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

--

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-07 16:49 GMT+03:00 Timothy Lawrence <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au>:

"You can learn the language described here with assurance that it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters."
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

I only use CLL Lojban. I believe that an unambiguous language needs to have a central, singular version to stay unambiguous.

I don't know much about the history of OpenGL but it, from a surface level, seems similar to the history of C++, which I am familiar with.
By and large, new features are added to the C++ language, but every version is backwards-compatible with older versions (and almost entirely compatible with its predecessor, C).
An older compiler might choke on new language features, but a new compiler will always work with old code.

Compiler vendors may introduce their own language features as forks (and they are not considered standard C++), but there is always a standard/"strict" mode that can be enabled. Most good features that compilers introduce have been added to the official version, perhaps changed in a way to integrate them better.

This is what I think Lojban should be like.

I want all new / official Lojban versions to be CLL-compatible.



> "jbo_*" (imagine "jbo_FR", "jbo_EN", "jbo_CA"...),

I do not want there to be "jbo_A", "jbo_B", "jbo_C"... that are all incompatible.

I do want "jbo_1", "jbo_2", "jbo_3"..., where it's a sequential chronology and each is a more improved (but backwards-compatible) version.

A tool could explicitly support "jbo_2" and it would implicitly support "jbo_1". If a tool just says it supports "jbo", it would be presumed to support the latest.

Remember though that Lojban is not a programming language in that its grammar is not fully formal, only parts of it are. It's quite possible and noted that there can be internal bugs (even if those are mistypes in its English documentation) that won't make Lojban "compile".

 

> But this group ("committee"?) should accept the fact that language will evolve, whether they like it or not.

I hope that this means that they accept the language can change, by backwards-compatible design and not evolution via drift.

C++ does not at all "evolve" like a natural language and I don't think Lojban should, either. Because C++ has maintained a centralised standard and continued to update, I think it possible for Lojban to do so.



> What is clear, however, is that people don't want to use CLL Lojban (despite the fact that it is still the most thoroughly documented version).

I do.

I still don't know what it means "clear". How can  person not want to use CLL Lojban if 'ey doesn't speak it? Bad tutorials? CLL being hard to understand? But if we are talking about fluent speakers then does it matter what they want to speak when they already speak CLL Lojban and the rest doesn't have documentation?

 

I think most people want to use the latest version of something. I see the CLL Lojban as the latest version, for the backwards-compatibility reasons mentioned above.

I have seen CLL-incompatible versions advertised on the website and new learners are likely to intuit that it's intrinsically better to choose the "latest version", not knowing that learning the modern versions entails embracing a schism.

> To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

This is so true for me, and one of the reasons that I became more quiet (although I am writing an unannounced novel that contains CLL Lojban).

> I just don't want to spend time learning things if they would be thrown away in a few months/years

> sykynder: You mention re-integrating forks back into the core language. How do you change something and then make it the same as it was before?

I believe all official Lojban changes must be backwards-compatible for Lojban to succeed in its goal of being unambiguous (let alone succeed in other ways, such as adoption).



> E.g. learning a revised meaning {lo} is no big deal.

It's not just about learning, it's about effort invested in writing tools, texts, chatbots and parsers (et cetera).
It's about breaking that promise in the CLL that the language will not be subject to further fiddling.

Introducing changes that break Lojban compatibility will
- waste invested time in the older version
- waste invested money in buying the older CLL (etc)
- alienate those who wasted their time/money
- introduce more ambiguity (The Lojban version changes the meaning!!)

(Why did CLL-{le} become modern-{lo}

and the modern-{le} get introduced, instead of just introducing the new {lo} to mean what modern-{le} means and keeping CLL-{le} as the default?)

well, {le} didn't become {lo} in most dialects ...

 

As learning a revised meaning is no big deal, simply redoing these changes to be compatible with CLL Lojban should be no big deal ;)



"Lojban does not yet have nearly the vocabulary it needs to be a fully usable language of the modern world"
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

If we can agree to move forward using CLL Lojban and only make backwards-compatible changes, then I can personally say I'll be happy to resume devoting time, energy and money into Lojban.

Ok, can you join BPFK committee or LLG to help us update CLL at least in terms of fixing mistypes?

 

Lojban's usefulness as an unambiguous language is so important to me.

It doesn't have to be "perfect" or "better", it just has to be unambiguous and complete.


I want to help complete Lojban, and any processes of governance surrounding it, to reunite it.

Thanks for reading,

mi'e la timoteios.

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of suke...@gmail.com <suke...@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, 6 November 2017 6:04 AM
To: lojban
Subject: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

 

Wow. This is even worse than I thought.

One great thing about Lojban is that it is supposed to be unique. What I read here is like if people said "Hey, I invented a Lojban-French", and "Me, a Lojban-Chinese", and "Lojban-English"... That sounds so stupid.

Let me be clear: I'm NOT judging anyone forking Lojban. Surely they had good reasons to do so. Actually nobody can pretend forseeing any case, and write an "immutable" language. So yes, it is obvious that the language evolves and will evolve, even an hypothetic "official an unique" Lojban.

What is unfortunate is that all forking work should be reintegrated in some way to the "trunk", or else we'll end up with many "Lojbans" wich will actually kill Lojban (whatever version).

I understand the lack of leadership, but it feels more like a lack of structures for democraty. It would be nice to have such structures, but unfortunately I don't know how this could be initiated. One idea would be to mimic software, a bit as OpenGL did, having the core, extensions, and proposals.

To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

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[Gregorio Guidi]

coi

I am a passive observer within the Lojban community, following on-and-off for the past years and being interested particularly in the algorithmic aspects of Lojban structure and Lojban parsing.

I pick up the thread at this point juts to say that the issue raised resonates a lot with me.

Trying to be very concrete: let's say I have some hours to dedicate to the project... is there some action that I could do that would increase the chances of reaching a CLL 2.0, or a 4th baseline grammar, or in general to have an updated specification of how "official" Lojban should be understood?

I would be happy to hear your suggestions!

mi'e la .greg.

On November 6, 2017 2:41:42 PM CET, guskant <gusni...@gmail.com> wrote:
>Le lundi 6 novembre 2017 09:32:10 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

>> ...

>>
>> Anyway, if you say the BPFK works as I described, then I feel it's
>good
>> news. However:
>>

>> - From afar, CLL seems a bit "stuck" at 1.1. Am I right? Do you

>think
>> there would be some 1.x before 2.0 (ie. minor updates)?
>>
>>
>
>You will find issues for CLL 1.2 here:
>
>https://github.com/lojban/cll/milestone/12
>
>The issues were already discussed by past lojbanists, and Cirko worked
>on
>introducing them into the next version of CLL. Gleki asked BPFK members
>for
>approval of them, and no one responded:
>
>https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/bpfk-list/jqVDF5z9LqA
>
>I, as a member of BPFK, am responsible for approving them, but I did
>not
>have enough time for that. Even if I have time for that, I can't
>imagine
>that I can approve any English texts written by an native English
>speaker
>because I'm very poor at English.
>
>You can freely approve them even if you are not a member of BPFK. If
>you
>want to do it as a member of BPFK, just post a message in Lojban to
>"bpfk-list" Google Group at the URL above, saying that you want to be a
>
>member, and you will be admitted.
>
>
>

>> - As I said on #ckule (IRC), it might be a good idea to write on

>the
>> front page the version of the CLL and its release date ;-)
>>
>>
>
>I agree.
>
>
>
>>

>> - Are some "betas" / "working branches" available (or will be

>> available), so that people get a chance to have a look at before
>the
>> official release?

>> - Do you have in mind any plausible releases dates? I'm not asking

>> the official CLL? Or do you feel that *some* people forking are

>simply
>> impatient having their proposals integrated? What is your point of
>view?
>>
>> la .sykyndyr.
>>
>> .i mi kamjunmre mi fi la .lojban. me'a lu .abu. pa li'u le ropno
>bangu bo
>> manri
>>

><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages>

>>
>
>
>lo'ai fi sa'ai fu le'ai ie pei
>i ji'a e'u lo'ai me'a lu .abu. pa li'u sa'ai li .abu pi'e pa le'ai ie
>pei
>
>
>
>> .i ganai la .lojban. pe mi toldra gi e'o o'anai ko dragau
>> (I self-evaluate my Lojban level as being less than A1, as for the
>CEFR
>>

><https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages>.

[And Rosta]

On 7 November 2017 at 13:49, Timothy Lawrence <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au> wrote:

"You can learn the language described here with assurance that it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters."
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

I only use CLL Lojban. I believe that an unambiguous language needs to have a central, singular version to stay unambiguous.

We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent, is not complete, and especially cannot be completed in a coherent way that is consistent with CLL. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who understands and cares about logic and consistency has ever maintained that CLL Lojban is viable. However, there are people who hold that fidelity to CLL -- and to a standard dialect that emerges spontaneously from CLL-faithful usage -- is of paramount importance, outweighing considerations of logic and consistency. The community has always been polarized between these two positions; all that has changed is that the former group has grown at the expense of the latter, as the requisite understanding of the logical issues has spread.

--And.

[guskant]

Le mardi 7 novembre 2017 08:49:56 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

doi la .guskant.

Thanks for the links. That seems interesting, but I just can't read big Lojban discussions: it took me days (yeah, from time to time, not continuously!) to read and understand 100% of this famous "la .teris."!

My current level is one of the reasons why I'm absolutely not ready to enter any board or committee.

BPFK decided in 2015 to talk in Lojban, but LLG meeting is still talked in English. Some of LLG members are not fluent in Lojban. The LLG meeting is held on a private mailing list, and anyone can attend the meeting by subscribing to the list:

http://mail.lojban.org/mailman/listinfo/llg-members

You can even request the membership of LLG voting member.

 

Is there an HTML version somewhere so that everyone can access it without developer tools?

HTML version of what?

BPFK and LLG are held in mailing list, and Lojban Coders' Group is held on Github. I don't find any other version of meeting minutes.

 

* Paralysis *

So, according to what you say, BPFK is really paralyzed. When you want to rely on someone's work, well, (s)he might simply be overloaded with other tasks and may never answer. It seems that there are no "replacement" guys/gals: if one is not able to perform a task, whatever the reason, then nobody can replace him/her. Do you think so too?

Yes.

 

It feels so dramatic to me that you've lost hope. It is exactly what I feared: anyone can do whatever, in whatever direction. That's freedom. That's not wrong in itself. But... nothing more? Ideas create "explosions" and there is no structure at all to make all of this collapse to something better and organized?

I made some critical remarks on the CLL Lojban, and someone agreed, but finally I did not receive enough reaction for including any ideas of them into the CLL:

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/gadri:_an_unofficial_commentary_from_a_logical_point_of_view

(written in 2014)

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_Complement_to_causation_sumtcita

(written in 2015)

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/na_go'i

(written in 2016)

 

You told your efforts were blocked by some people. Were there discussions (I mean enough discussions)? Voting? Enough participants in voting? Enough time for the committee to work on proposals?

• If so, maybe there is something to do with structures (as said above)?
  
• If not, maybe all committee members should accept the fact that language will evolve?
  

Some of the issues were discussed, I think enough, but not brought to voting. As for the others, discussion was stopped in midway. I think the problem is caused by the structure of the committee. 

 

* Funds *

As I just told to Gleki : "even if many Lojbanists are enthusiasts, they all need money to live and cannot work for free indefinitely".

You know, some guy on the Facebook group (Сергей Ильинских) asked if "crypto-currency rewards" could be an idea for translations jobs. At first I thought this was not very useful, and surely complex to set up. However, I feel now that the idea behind this (money to encourage people working on Lojban stuff) may be one of the "energy sources" that would change the game. Of course, this has to be very carefully handled! But we may imagine something like periodic small fund raising (donations, crowdfunding, etc.) on one hand, and a system putting clear (and small) objectives and rewards on the other hand. I feel like the idea has to be enhanced and discussed... But don't you think it is worth debating on this? This of course would be only some tools to help, and the current organizations would still be there and help.

At least in the current structure of committees, any ideas about rewards will be stuck. Rewards should belong to LLG's business, but the LLG meeting is completely died. My motions for rescuing official contents were always ignored. They were not even discussed. The main part of the meeting consists of roll call, voting for the board members, and voting for closing the meeting.

 

* Organizations *

An by the way, this thread highlighted the fact that there are 3 "major" groups down there: LLG, GPFK, and the Coders Group. Even if history may explain why there are three, the current "freezing" status of all may be a signal for changing things. I don't know even 1% of what each did; but FROM AFAR, it seems that all organizations share some common interests, and may perform better together. Of course, merging everyone into a single entity is surely fictional. But they may organize as "subsidiary companies", sharing a purely administrative section with some functional parts (ex: financial as for the previous topic, rule sets, etc.). Do you feel this would be technically possible? And would this be desirable and profitable?

I guess those three groups worked like a parent company (LLG) and subsidiary companies (BPFK, Lojban Coders' Group) in the past. BPFK was created by LLG in order to complete technical documents. Lojban Coders' Group was created by voluntary IT engineers, among which there were members of LLG or BPFK, maybe for creating various tools for learning Lojban.

Currently, none of them work fine. LLG is died, BPFK is dying, Lojban Coders' Group is mixing official and unofficial contents without mentioning responsibility of the unofficial contents.

 

I thought about this overnight (!) and specifically about one rule: as people discuss about language, is it wise to allow discussions to be in Lojban only? Maybe a common rule of requiring a (rough?) translation in another "reference" language would help. Of course, as there are plenty of materials in English out there, it seems logical that this would be English, but that's not mandatory, I guess.

You known, I'm willing to help but I can only help organizing stuff, and spreading the word. Not much more because of my too recent implication.

I have no problem in discussing Lojban in Lojban. Discussion of Lojban in English continued until 2015, and it also worked fine. I personally profit more from discussion in Lojban as Lojban exercises. I don't know what the other members of BPFK think about it.

BPFK is currently dying, so it might be worth trying English discussion as AED.

 

* [side note] *

Thank you very much for helping me improving my skills.

• "li .abu pi'e pa" is just a great idea! I didn't know how to convert the "A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2" levels, so I used a basic "translation". But putting as if it was a number "A dot 1" of unspecified base is awesome!
  
• But what about the "less than"? Can I write "me'i li .abu pi'e pa"?
  

I forgot taking your word {me'a}. It is a function word of part of speech BAI, and related to {mleca}. {me'a X} means therefore that X is less than something involved in the meaning of the statement.

If you wanted to say "less than X" using a function word of BAI, {mau X} or {se me'a X} would be suitable.

In my expression, it should be replaced by {me'i} just after {li}:

li me'i .abu pi'e pa

 

• My bad about "fo" (and not "fi"): I was counting "fa" from x2 instead of x1, as for "se" (because there is no "x1 <-> x1" swapping cmavo), so I had an offset of 1. I mixed up counting rules!
  
• Note : I thought "me'a..." was a sumti place, but parser told me it's a modal. So I guess I cannot use it, or else "le ropno bangu bo manri" would fall in m3 place (units) of "kamjunmre".
• Finally, your last sentence is too obscure for my level! What I understand: "One cannot say `I'm never wrong`. I can only wish (???)".

By my last sentence {i na'i ma'i mi na'e toldra i po'o .au sajgau do lo xauzma be fi mi}, I meant "well, from my point of view, you are not wrong. I only want to let you know something better according to me."

 

ki'ecai

(You may want to insert {do'u}, {i}, {mi'e} or any other words for separation here, otherwise you are thanking you.)

 

la .sykyndyr.

mu'o mi'e la guskant

 

[John E Clifford]

A comment in a recent note suggests that folks have been diddling with {le} and {lo} yet again (still?).  As someone who devoted several pounds of paper (virtual, of course) to that issue over the last 40 years, I am curious to new hat the latest turn is.  When last I looked, {le x} was a term  that arbitrarily designed a node with a pragmatic (but not necessarily semantic ) link to x.  {lo x} designated the salient node in the matrix generated by part-whole on the set of xs.  What are the new wrinkles?

pycyn

--

[MorphemeAddict]

It's that 3rd point, the reintegration into the core, which I see as untenable. 

And what constitutes the core, anyway? 

Learning things about the language that only fluent speakers can know means the language will be improvable in ways the original designers couldn't have anticipated (or they would have). Therefore change is inevitable. What's not likely, though, is that the change will keep the language unified, even backward-compatible. Something along the way (an imperfection in the original design) will become broken when the change occurs, and this is unavoidable. 

For those who want to learn a language that will never change, pick something like Sanskrit or Middle Egyptian. Languages MUST change to stay alive. 

stevo

Virus-free. www.avast.com

[Robert Slaughter]

PC, the only update to le/lo that I am aware of is 'xorlo', written up here: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/How_to_use_xorlo

----

Bob Slaughter

http://www.facebook.com/robert.s.slaughter 

"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -- Plato

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." -- Albert Einstein

"Nothing emboldens the wicked so greatly as the lack of courage on the part of the good." -- Pope Leo XIII, encyclical 'On Christians as Citizens'

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[John E Clifford]

But xorlo is pretty much what I described and is at least a half dozen years old, so hardly counts as recent tinkering.  Of course, people have constantly tinkered with xorlo, but not changed it essentially. 

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/ na_go'i

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[John E Clifford]

So MA's point seems to be that the Lojban project is impossible by the nature of language, since, evenif we do eventually create a language that meets the ideal, as soon as people learn it, it will fall away into ordinariness again.  The only possible ways out seem to be to believe that changes in the language will always be merely to vocabulary, never to grammar, or that every change in the grammar can be met with a compensating that restores the old system or creates a new one just as good.  Both of those hopes seem as unlikely as no change at all.  

So, the goal of Lojban is create once the ideal language, then pickle it forever as a display.

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[MorphemeAddict]

No, not "fall into ordinariness again". Rather, it will be improved to fix or remove the problems discovered by the fluent speakers that weren't known to the designers. A constant progression to a better language. 

stevo 

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[John E Clifford]

Well, but the language it is meant to be is a very delicate balance: logical in a technical sense, monoparsed, and whatever else folks have added on.  A change in grammar will almost inevitably alter some of these things and restoring the balance will not be easy (and often not possible).  It may be a better language in all sorts of ways (stripped of excrescences, say), but it will. not be the Lojban of the prospectus and so, arguably, not Lojban at all (name notwithstanding).  

pycyn

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[Timothy Lawrence]

> Ok, can you join BPFK committee or LLG to help us update CLL at least in terms of fixing mistypes?

Alright sure, if they are happy with a novice joining :)

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 8 November 2017 12:20 AM
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

 

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-07 20:29 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com>:

{lo x} designated the salient node in the matrix generated by part-whole on the set of xs.  What are the new wrinkles?

Still the same, simply not everyone understand it. It's plural {lo} with maximal scope. One of attempts to define it compared to CLL is here:

http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/dict/lo'o'o

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .pycyn.

Thanks for clarification.

I can imagine how you feel, because you are actually describing the nightmare I was guessing.

I personally still have (a bit of) hope, but if what you say is true, that may require more sacrifices from some people. Indeed, as far as I understand, multiple people stay on their own mind, but have different positions. So waiting more and more will just freeze ("fossilize"?) everything in a non-desirable state.

[suke...@gmail.com]

@timoteios: I would love backward-compatibility too, and I guess it would be good to TRY to do so. Unfortunately, I must slightly disagree with you: this is not 100% possible. Well I'm also a C++ developer, and even in that language the backward-compatibility is not 100%. Remember the old "auto" keyword in "C"? Well, its definition and behavior changed for C++2011! And generally speaking, you cannot just take an old piece of code and expect it would 100% work with the latest tools. I tried it! It may work sometimes, but this is not desirable. Indeed, developers learned a lot about what to NOT DO with old language, and created guidelines to move away from bad practices. And this takes time! This is the reason why "CPP Core Guidelines" exist... So yes, as you say, we should try to have linear history, backward-compatibility, and such. But that's a non-reachable target, IMO.

However, having a committee reviewing the "standard" of the language (as ISO for C++), is just what sounds good to me. Do you think ISO could be the organization to deal with Lojban? :-)

Finally, we should be careful about moving forward to new versions. C++ adopted a 3-years period. Lojban initially adopted 5-years. I feel it is reasonable (even if I tend to use always the latest/beta software for my personal usage!). This leaves time for people to get hands on the new things. And remember there are millions of people knowing C++, and maybe only a few thousands for Lojban... Evolution can't use the same frequency.

Don't you think?

la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-07 15:50 GMT+03:00 Gregorio Guidi <gregori...@posteo.net>:

Trying to be very concrete: let's say I have some hours to dedicate to the project... is there some action that I could do that would increase the chances of reaching a CLL 2.0, or a 4th baseline grammar, or in general to have an updated specification of how "official" Lojban should be understood?

You can join LLG by sending a request in English to llg-m...@lojban.org In case you get no reply please report.

As for what actually needs to be done to reach CLL 2.0 that depends on what you want. If you fork CLL yourself and update something there others might not like it. If 10 people update it still e.g. 3 people might not like it etc.

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .greg.

As discussed before, it seems that for now work is absolutely not guided. This makes creation easy, but at the expense of building a strong and unique "core" (~= "official"?) language.

I personally think that there is much to do organizing stuff before you try to address core issues or core improvements. As Gleki wrote, doing stuff on your own will certainly be seen as another "schism", even if you try and pretend doing that for the core language. I bet that going in that direction will end up with "Ok, great job, but we don't want to integrate it because X, Y or Z".

I'm currently trying to think about & prepare proposals to improve organizations. I'll tell you all soon, so that we can debate. Please share your thoughts!

la .sykyndyr.

[suke...@gmail.com]

@And Rosta : Are there many people thinking strict logic is more important than usability?? I mean, it's okay to me to try getting a language based on logic, and try to keep it "the most logical as possible". But language itself is not a fully formal, consistent and complete (as you and Gleki said recently, and as even CLL says), so why the hell try to be strict on logic when those areas of interest are not strict? As far as I understand from the history & documentation, even the start idea behind the LOGICAL language was not to make it FULLY logical, but BASED on logic. Am I right?

la .sykyndyr.

[suke...@gmail.com]

doi la .guskant.

In a few words, I understand from your answers that there are many structure & organizational issues. And I personally think that your efforts of commenting CLL 1.1 should be somewhere in an official deposit, or in a GitHub pull request, or so. But this requires:

1. That the ROLES of reviewing, integrating, validating, voting, etc. are filled with people that can answer in a reasonable time.

2. That the submission protocol is clear, well defined, official, and friendly. I personally think that GitHub pull requests are fine, but others means can be good too... as long as it's not a burden like sending raw emails to someone in private.

Thus, I guess that one of the first things to improve the situation will be to define roles. I'll get back on that mailing list as soon as I have a (more or less clean) proposal to submit to you all. Would you like then to debate? I mean with everybody on that mailing list, uh?

Notes :

• I was talking about a live HTML version of the "beta" CLL 1.2 (not meetings)! :-) Is there any?
  
• Discussing Lojban in Lojban is surely a very good exercise, and that may make some issues of the language arise (I mean: the more you use it, the more you test it in real situation). But if "roles" may apply, and if people are subject to move around, then maybe it would be a good idea to get a translation somewhere... Well I'm not absolutely sure on that point but that's what I'm currently thinking about.
  
• Thanks for the language help. Don't be so modest! You actually had the role of a professor/sensei/guide on that point and I thank you for that. (My bad about missing separator! ;-) )
  

ki'e .i

la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-08 11:51 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

• I was talking about a live HTML version of the "beta" CLL 1.2 (not meetings)! :-) Is there any?
  

There is no such as official CLL 1.2.

Even CLL 1.0 and CLL 1.1 can be named official only if LLG considers *.lojban.org pages official but there was no procedure in making them official. John Cowan wrote CLL 1.0, that's it. Robin Powell published CLL 1.1 with a bunch of fixes compared to CLL 1.0, that's it.

There is a list of errata in CLL, whichla mezohe and la gleki recently turned into a table:

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/CLL,_aka_Reference_Grammar,_Errata

If you fork https://github.com/lojban/cll/ and then apply prs from https://github.com/lojban/cll/milestone/12 there then you may get something like CLL 1.2 (mostly fixes of mistypes in English sentences)

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[Timothy Lawrence]

> We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent,

What do you mean? Is there something that documents this?

> is not complete,

I agree and would like to help complete it.

> and especially cannot be completed in a coherent way that is consistent with CLL.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "complete". I am talking from a user perspective and I don't see why completing it would cause issues.

Some things I would like to see for completion include:

- full dictionary fully described in Lojban
- complete reference grammar written in Lojban
- Lojban words to describe Lojban versions, Lojban grammar, place structures, etc.
- full website, available also in pure Lojban, with only official content and process of content approval
- user-friendly parsers and grammar-checkers easily available on major platforms
- official learning resources tested and refined (and also centralised so there's only one official one of each kind)
- translations of core materials (i.e. those mentioned in above dot points) to major/target languages
- governance structure in place to produce new Lojban versions
- automatic translators (from Lojban into natural languages) available

It's a big wishlist, but I don't see how these things would break the grammar.

What do you think?

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of And Rosta <and....@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 8 November 2017 1:35 AM
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

 

--

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-08 15:54 GMT+03:00 Timothy Lawrence <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au>:

> We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent,

What do you mean? Is there something that documents this?

> is not complete,

I agree and would like to help complete it.

> and especially cannot be completed in a coherent way that is consistent with CLL.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "complete". I am talking from a user perspective and I don't see why completing it would cause issues.

Some things I would like to see for completion include:

You probably mean that those need all to be officiaized by LLG? Because otherwise many of those things already exist.

- full dictionary fully described in Lojban
- complete reference grammar written in Lojban
- Lojban words to describe Lojban versions, Lojban grammar, place structures, etc.
- full website, available also in pure Lojban, with only official content and process of content approval
- user-friendly parsers and grammar-checkers easily available on major platforms

what is "user friendly"? Please, write requirements, other might try to implement them.

- official learning resources tested and refined (and also centralised so there's only one official one of each kind)

Impossible since different people like different methods.

 

- translations of core materials (i.e. those mentioned in above dot points) to major/target languages

have you started translating anything?

 

- governance structure in place to produce new Lojban versions
- automatic translators (from Lojban into natural languages) available

officialized by LLG? Seriously? Then LLG would have to formalize natlangs too...

It's a big wishlist, but I don't see how these things would break the grammar.

What do you think?

---

From: loj...@googlegroups.com <loj...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of And Rosta <and....@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 8 November 2017 1:35 AM
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

 

On 7 November 2017 at 13:49, Timothy Lawrence <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au> wrote:

"You can learn the language described here with assurance that it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters."
- Complete Lojban Language http://lojban.github.io/cll/1/2/

I only use CLL Lojban. I believe that an unambiguous language needs to have a central, singular version to stay unambiguous.

We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent, is not complete, and especially cannot be completed in a coherent way that is consistent with CLL. To the best of my knowledge, nobody who understands and cares about logic and consistency has ever maintained that CLL Lojban is viable. However, there are people who hold that fidelity to CLL -- and to a standard dialect that emerges spontaneously from CLL-faithful usage -- is of paramount importance, outweighing considerations of logic and consistency. The community has always been polarized between these two positions; all that has changed is that the former group has grown at the expense of the latter, as the requisite understanding of the logical issues has spread.

--And.

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[Remo Dentato]

Translations or (better) production of original material in Lojban is, imho, what we really miss.

I believe that the language should evolve by usage and having a "lojban corpus" would be the best way of communicate what "right lojban" is. It's no different from other languages.

To me, CLL should be THE starting point for everyone. The only features to add/change would be those that would fix problems with actual text.

Possibly texts of different nature we have novels, children books, comics, some poetry. Philosphy, history, physics, religion and many other topics (that would require specific words and/or specific ways of saying things) are missing.

It is very important that theoretical work (e.g. if a specific cmavo is to be added, the impact of using plural logic, ...) is done in parallel, so that we have solutions for when problems arise or, even better, to prevent those problems.

What should drive the adoption of this or that feature is real usage. Preferably in written text so to laid a solid foundation for the others.

my 2c

mu'o mi'e la .remod.

[suke...@gmail.com]

[This is a try for summarizing discussions]

@all

* Living language *

I've read a bit though more pages and messages. And found that historically speaking, and according to what's in the FAQ and other LLG pages, Lojban is not immutable at all. Else it would be a "dead language" like ancient Greek (to paraphrase la .stevo.) or a pure experiment for a specific point in time. However, it is considered as "stable", even if changes may occur, because else it "would require people to re-learn things" (as some of you pointed out). Thus, changes are possible but must be CAREFULLY validated.

So in two words: "Lojban evolves". Right.

That's my point of view too. And that's where issues arise!... Indeed, validating changes is a huge job requiring time, structures, procedures, and language skills (if not more). I feel la .pycyn. is right saying it "is a very delicate balance". And la .stevo. too, talking about very difficult reintegrations of forks to the core.

* Pending organizational issues *

Moreover, la .guskant. clearly told us that current organizations are dead or almost dead. So here is a small and macroscopic summary of what I feel like pending issues (feel free to complete/fix):

• Missing info about status of people (ex: no more time to spend on the project)
  
• Missing "roles" (about what to do) and assignations (which one does what)
  
• Missing well defined and easy-to-use protocols for:
• Submission, reviewing, voting, integrating (of new official content)
• Certification (of existing content)
• Low notoriety
• More would bring new Lojbanists (and thus more manpower)
• Non-Lojbanists generally don't even know about it (= word not spread)
• Not enough time for skilled Lojbanists to do all what would be necessary to improve
• A few persons "on their own mind", blocking stuff

However, to make things move, there must be a consensus on the basics, so...

* Lojban basics *

What defines Lojban? (Or "What should never change in Lojban?"). So, if I try to sum up again from various sources, the answers are below (please tell if you disagree):

YES!

• Non-ambiguous grammar (~= monoparsing, machine parsable)
  
• Unicity (~= forks are experiments or proposals)
  
• Cultural neutrality
  
• Partially based on logic
  
• Rather stable ("rather" has to be refined)
  
• Usable (speakable, learnable, writable, readable...)
  
• Usage defines the language, as long as these "basics" are untouched.
• However the "usage" is rather a blurry situation for now... 

NO!

• Immutable base grammar, and immutable base vocabulary (cmavo, important gismu...)
  
• Targeted to be TOTALLY based on logic
  
• Ideal (or "perfect") language (la .pycyn. pointed out that issue)
  

Maybe desirable, but impossible

• Backward-compatibility of versions (added after what la .timoteios. said)
  
• Fully formal and complete grammar (as Gleki and And Rosta said)
  
• Keep strictly what original designers wanted (because they could not foresee all potential issues)
  

[That concludes this first step. Please share your thoughts!]

la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-09 23:48 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

YES!

• Non-ambiguous grammar (~= monoparsing, machine parsable)
  

English is also machine parsable. See Stanford parser and many more.

 

• Unicity (~= forks are experiments or proposals)
  

so are many constructed languages including programming ones. 

• Cultural neutrality
  

The list of core verbs (gismu)  was borrowed from TLI Loglan and there from the list of core concepts in major European language. Cultural neutrality?

• Partially based on logic

• Rather stable ("rather" has to be refined)
  
• Usable (speakable, learnable, writable, readable...)
  
• Usage defines the language, as long as these "basics" are untouched.
• However the "usage" is rather a blurry situation for now... 

I have an alternative definition of what is Lojban:

* Lojban is a language called Lojban and created in 1987.

Yes!

* named "Lojban"

* created in 1987

No!

* named "English"

* doesn't yet have a single word for "to dance Macarena"

 

NO!

• Immutable base grammar, and immutable base vocabulary (cmavo, important gismu...)
  
• Targeted to be TOTALLY based on logic
  
• Ideal (or "perfect") language (la .pycyn. pointed out that issue)
  

Maybe desirable, but impossible

• Backward-compatibility of versions (added after what la .timoteios. said)
  
• Fully formal and complete grammar (as Gleki and And Rosta said)
  
• Keep strictly what original designers wanted (because they could not foresee all potential issues)
  

They also wanted it to be an international auxiliary language, btw.

[suke...@gmail.com]

Gleki,

First of all, my intent was not to offense anyone. But it seems, from your answer, that you were a bit... annoyed? Irritated?? Indeed, defining Lojban by "Lojban 1987" is a bit light, IMHO! I understand you'd like to avoid drifting much from the 1987 definition. But this definition is even not clear to me (hence the summary)!

Well, I was just trying to sum up things with a twofold goal: make it clear (to myself, to anyone not "expert"), and establish a kind of base rules to highlight what may NOT go in evolutions of Lojban (which brings me to the next point below...).

Just to make it clear: are you against evolving Lojban or not? I guess no, but I'm asking because your short answer may be (mis)interpreted as "I want Lojban to be forever what it was in 1987". Personally, I feel like engraving a standard into stone is not a good idea. I bet the best that can happen is evolution in a very "controlled" and "well thought" way; that is to say not "anyone making forks in any direction", and not "merging ideas 'as they come' into the standard" (such as "macarena" words... What a bad joke!).

About your answer: you're right, most languages are machine parsable. But:

1. I was talking about Lojban only.

2. This doesn't make other languages "non ambiguous" (in grammar).

I personally like Lojban because it is so unique: compared to languages I speak, it removes a whole burden of exceptions, ambiguities, and weird stuff. Well, all of these particularities also make those natural langues unique, but not in the way it would help learning them.

As for cultural neutrality, yes, it is indeed discutable. Maybe this would be moved to the "desirable" section? But as many pointed out, and despite the fact gismu used some natural languages as sources, Lojban sounds/looks like no other. And there is no emphasis on any culture, right? Maybe only some biases from time to time (to fix?). From my point of view, this is where it differentiates from Esparanto, which is closely related to Latin languages (I don't talk Esperanto, so correct me if I'm wrong).

"Auxiliary language" may come with the previous point, too.

Cheers,

la .sykynder.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-10 11:46 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

Gleki,

First of all, my intent was not to offense anyone. But it seems, from your answer, that you were a bit... annoyed? Irritated??

No, I just pointed out incorrect statements about Lojban in your list.

Indeed, defining Lojban by "Lojban 1987" is a bit light, IMHO! I understand you'd like to avoid drifting much from the 1987 definition. But this definition is even not clear to me (hence the summary)!

Well, I was just trying to sum up things with a twofold goal: make it clear (to myself, to anyone not "expert"), and establish a kind of base rules to highlight what may NOT go in evolutions of Lojban (which brings me to the next point below...).

Just to make it clear: are you against evolving Lojban or not?

No answer from me.

 

I guess no, but I'm asking because your short answer may be (mis)interpreted as "I want Lojban to be forever what it was in 1987". Personally, I feel like engraving a standard into stone is not a good idea. I bet the best that can happen is evolution in a very "controlled" and "well thought" way; that is to say not "anyone making forks in any direction", and not "merging ideas 'as they come' into the standard" (such as "macarena" words... What a bad joke!).

About your answer: you're right, most languages are machine parsable. But:

1. I was talking about Lojban only.

Defining Lojban via Lojban? Then why not "Lojban is Lojban" definition?

2. This doesn't make other languages "non ambiguous" (in grammar).

How? Please, provide examples how other languages are ambigous. Notice that some constructed languages (like TLI Loglan) are said to have exactly the same as Lojban in the same formalism.

 

I personally like Lojban because it is so unique

So is English, which is English and not non-English.

 

: compared to languages I speak, it removes a whole burden of exceptions, ambiguities, and weird stuff. Well, all of these particularities also make those natural langues unique, but not in the way it would help learning them.

Despite that more people speak Abkhaz than Lojban.

As for cultural neutrality, yes, it is indeed discutable. Maybe this would be moved to the "desirable" section?

So you break descriptivism and move into either politics or some "Future Lojban".

 

But as many pointed out, and despite the fact gismu used some natural languages as sources, Lojban sounds/looks like no other.

Sounds to whom? To me (not a native English speaker)  Lojban is the language most close to English compared to major spoken languages in the world.

And there is no emphasis on any culture, right?

Of course, therefore no word for Mozambique culture, a word for Malay culture is enough.

 

Maybe only some biases from time to time (to fix?). From my point of view, this is where it differentiates from Esparanto, which is closely related to Latin languages (I don't talk Esperanto, so correct me if I'm wrong).

To the languages the founder spoke (Latin, Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian and somewhat French, English ...)

--

[suke...@gmail.com]

Gleki Arxokuna:

No, I just pointed out incorrect statements about Lojban in your list.

Good. I'll try to set up a fixed list then.

Just to make it clear: are you against evolving Lojban or not?

No answer from me.

Oh. Surprising answer, but... as you wish.

1. I was talking about Lojban only.

Defining Lojban via Lojban? Then why not "Lojban is Lojban" definition?

No, no! Maybe my English was not clear. I was just saying I'm trying to define basics without using comparisons to languages. Just "common words", not lang. comparisons.

 

2. This doesn't make other languages "non ambiguous" (in grammar).

How? Please, provide examples how other languages are ambigous. Notice that some constructed languages (like TLI Loglan) are said to have exactly the same as Lojban in the same formalism.

Sure, here are some examples. I'm not 100% sure they are relevant, but that's just a few ideas.

English:

• "Sam likes you more that Max." => Does Sam likes you more than Max likes you? Or does Sam likes you more than (s)he likes Max?
  
• "Prettly little girl's school" (CLL example)
  

French:

• "Le prévenu avoue à son avocat qu’il a tué sa femme" => "sa" is not clear about which one it refers. That may happen in Lojban too using (for instance) a vague meaning like "ra". But French language has no means to make an unambiguous utterance here, except by adding a second utterance adding precision.
  
• "Voyant l'éléphant prisonnier des braconniers, il prit sa défense" => Here the word "défense" has multiple meanings.
• "J'ai perdu mes fils" => Similar. But here a pronunciation difference that makes the sentence unambiguous orally, but ambiguous when written.
• "Je suis Max" => May mean "I am Max" or "I'm following Max"

I know Lojban allows the speaker to be vague, and allows usage of approximations. And it is also NOT a context-free grammar. But there is a huge gap between native languages and Lojban on the topic of ambiguity, IMO.

I don't know for other conlangs, actually. Thanks for the info ; I'll have a look. Please note I'm NOT trying to "define how Lojban is unique compared to others".

 

I personally like Lojban because it is so unique

So is English, which is English and not non-English.

 

: compared to languages I speak, it removes a whole burden of exceptions, ambiguities, and weird stuff. Well, all of these particularities also make those natural langues unique, but not in the way it would help learning them.

Despite that more people speak Abkhaz than Lojban.

Yes. And...? What's the point?

 

As for cultural neutrality, yes, it is indeed discutable. Maybe this would be moved to the "desirable" section?

So you break descriptivism and move into either politics or some "Future Lojban".

Frontier is indeed not that clear, you're right. This is why I wrote "MAYBE desirable" in the original list. Those points may then be marked as such.

As for "Future Lojban", I must say I'm very happy with the current CLL and have no reason (apart from a few tiny fixes) to move. What I say is that despite of this, being against its evolution will induce more forks, more dilution, and finally will kill Lojban. I'm no seer/prophet and cannot be 100% sure of this, but many projects I saw ended this way. And thats seems obvious too, especially knowing how protectionism of Loglan ended.

But as many pointed out, and despite the fact gismu used some natural languages as sources, Lojban sounds/looks like no other.

Sounds to whom? To me (not a native English speaker)  Lojban is the language most close to English compared to major spoken languages in the world.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean: you think it sounds English, while others think it sounds Russian (I don't see how... but why not), and some others Portuguese... etc. So, it seems there are many answers. May that come from the initial gisu creation algorithm? I don't know.

Anyway, that was just a side note on my personal feelings...

 

And there is no emphasis on any culture, right?

Of course, therefore no word for Mozambique culture, a word for Malay culture is enough.

Really? Oh. Sorry then. I missed that kind of things. Maybe that could be a point to improve?

Maybe only some biases from time to time (to fix?). From my point of view, this is where it differentiates from Esparanto, which is closely related to Latin languages (I don't talk Esperanto, so correct me if I'm wrong).

To the languages the founder spoke (Latin, Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian and somewhat French, English ...)

Here also I suppose it may be one of the efforts to put on "future Lojban", to make it more neutral.

Thank you for having shared your point of view.

la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-10 14:25 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

Gleki Arxokuna:

No, I just pointed out incorrect statements about Lojban in your list.

Good. I'll try to set up a fixed list then.

Just to make it clear: are you against evolving Lojban or not?

No answer from me.

Oh. Surprising answer, but... as you wish.

1. I was talking about Lojban only.

Defining Lojban via Lojban? Then why not "Lojban is Lojban" definition?

No, no! Maybe my English was not clear. I was just saying I'm trying to define basics without using comparisons to languages. Just "common words", not lang. comparisons.

 

2. This doesn't make other languages "non ambiguous" (in grammar).

How? Please, provide examples how other languages are ambigous. Notice that some constructed languages (like TLI Loglan) are said to have exactly the same as Lojban in the same formalism.

Sure, here are some examples. I'm not 100% sure they are relevant, but that's just a few ideas.

English:

• "Sam likes you more that Max." => Does Sam likes you more than Max likes you? Or does Sam likes you more than (s)he likes Max?
  
• "Prettly little girl's school" (CLL example)
  

{.i mi klama} = "I come, I came, I will have come" ? Ambiguous.

French:

• "Le prévenu avoue à son avocat qu’il a tué sa femme" => "sa" is not clear about which one it refers. That may happen in Lojban too using (for instance) a vague meaning like "ra".

Right.

 

• But French language has no means to make an unambiguous utterance here, except by adding a second utterance adding precision.
  

Right. Or referring by name. When you need precision you add words, similar in Lojban.

 

• "Voyant l'éléphant prisonnier des braconniers, il prit sa défense" => Here the word "défense" has multiple meanings.

Lojban is not by definition free of polysemy.

 

• "J'ai perdu mes fils" => Similar. But here a pronunciation difference that makes the sentence unambiguous orally, but ambiguous when written.

That's where I agree in regard to French. Lojban and Mandarin Chinese have unambiguous self-segregation morphology provided that communication channel has low noise.

• "Je suis Max" => May mean "I am Max" or "I'm following Max"

I know Lojban allows the speaker to be vague, and allows usage of approximations. And it is also NOT a context-free grammar. But there is a huge gap between native languages and Lojban on the topic of ambiguity, IMO.

I hope my sarcastic but serious (ge'exo'o ge'ezo'onai) remarks proved that wrong.

I don't know for other conlangs, actually. Thanks for the info ; I'll have a look. Please note I'm NOT trying to "define how Lojban is unique compared to others".

It'd be imo more productive to simply remove from the analysis anything that looks like a conlang (proglangs, Esperanto, gua\spi)

 

I personally like Lojban because it is so unique

So is English, which is English and not non-English.

 

: compared to languages I speak, it removes a whole burden of exceptions, ambiguities, and weird stuff. Well, all of these particularities also make those natural langues unique, but not in the way it would help learning them.

Despite that more people speak Abkhaz than Lojban.

Yes. And...? What's the point?

Even if at some theoretical level Lojban is easier to learn no one learns it. It's like one of cryptic proglangs that geeks adore, discuss its pragmatic usefullness but almost no one uses.

 

As for cultural neutrality, yes, it is indeed discutable. Maybe this would be moved to the "desirable" section?

So you break descriptivism and move into either politics or some "Future Lojban".

Frontier is indeed not that clear, you're right. This is why I wrote "MAYBE desirable" in the original list. Those points may then be marked as such.

As for "Future Lojban", I must say I'm very happy with the current CLL and have no reason (apart from a few tiny fixes) to move. What I say is that despite of this, being against its evolution will induce more forks, more dilution, and finally will kill Lojban. I'm no seer/prophet and cannot be 100% sure of this, but many projects I saw ended this way. And thats seems obvious too, especially knowing how protectionism of Loglan ended.

But as many pointed out, and despite the fact gismu used some natural languages as sources, Lojban sounds/looks like no other.

Sounds to whom? To me (not a native English speaker)  Lojban is the language most close to English compared to major spoken languages in the world.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean: you think it sounds English, while others think it sounds Russian (I don't see how... but why not), and some others Portuguese... etc. So, it seems there are many answers. May that come from the initial gisu creation algorithm? I don't know.

Anyway, that was just a side note on my personal feelings...

 

And there is no emphasis on any culture, right?

Of course, therefore no word for Mozambique culture, a word for Malay culture is enough.

Really? Oh. Sorry then. I missed that kind of things. Maybe that could be a point to improve?

Maybe only some biases from time to time (to fix?). From my point of view, this is where it differentiates from Esparanto, which is closely related to Latin languages (I don't talk Esperanto, so correct me if I'm wrong).

To the languages the founder spoke (Latin, Polish, German, Yiddish, Russian and somewhat French, English ...)

Here also I suppose it may be one of the efforts to put on "future Lojban", to make it more neutral.

Thank you for having shared your point of view.

la .sykyndyr.

[suke...@gmail.com]

{.i mi klama} = "I come, I came, I will have come" ? Ambiguous.

Ambiguous? I'd rather say "vague". I mean, for me, is is grammatically perfectly clear, despite no tense is provided.

Right. Or referring by name. When you need precision you add words, similar in Lojban.

Yup. I just told that there is no grammatical mean in French, whereas there are in Lojban. Of course, means may be cumbersome... and that's another point!

Lojban is not by definition free of polysemy.

Sure! But as a conlang with such base rules, polysemy has not the same "level", IMO.

That's where I agree in regard to French. Lojban and Mandarin Chinese have unambiguous self-segregation morphology provided that communication channel has low noise.

Really? I thought is was not that always the case. Anyway, I often hear, those says, people having much trouble with pronunciation (in French); this generally strongly affects the meaning. There are many famous pairs / paraphony ("et" / "est", "pomme" / "paume", etc.). This makes me think that tiny differences generate more issues.

 

I know Lojban allows the speaker to be vague, and allows usage of approximations. And it is also NOT a context-free grammar. But there is a huge gap between native languages and Lojban on the topic of ambiguity, IMO.

I hope my sarcastic but serious (ge'exo'o ge'ezo'onai) remarks proved that wrong.

Well, of course, no one can say "Lojban is perfect, everything else is crap". Lojban has issues. That's obvious. But what I mean is that Lojban tends to avoid some common issues in languages. The difference is not "day and night" of course. But I'm still not convinced that the gap is small, or that Lojban is "just another language".

However I must say all your remarks are interesting. Thanks again.

 

I don't know for other conlangs, actually. Thanks for the info ; I'll have a look. Please note I'm NOT trying to "define how Lojban is unique compared to others".

It'd be imo more productive to simply remove from the analysis anything that looks like a conlang (proglangs, Esperanto, gua\spi)

Alright!

Despite that more people speak Abkhaz than Lojban.

Yes. And...? What's the point?

Even if at some theoretical level Lojban is easier to learn no one learns it. It's like one of cryptic proglangs that geeks adore, discuss its pragmatic usefullness but almost no one uses.

Are you saying it's not worth learning Lojban? If so, your position is then unclear to me. Or are you saying that despite efforts people still see it as a doomed & geek language (which is a bit what I said about "low notoriety")?

la .sykyndyr.

[Michael Turniansky]

• "Voyant l'éléphant prisonnier des braconniers, il prit sa défense" => Here the word "défense" has multiple meanings

  I am not a francophone, and Google translate was at best unclear.  I'm guessing the polysemy here is:

fau lo nu ga'a mi zerkalte lo xanto kei ku mi badgau (lo xanto lo zerkalte se pi'o lo celxa'i mu'a)

vs.

fau lo nu ga'a mi zerkalte lo xanto kei ku mi badgau (lo'i xanto lo nu cmaze'a lo ka klani) 

 (which, if true, means the same polysemy exists in lojban, although I could have used "...stogau lo ni xanto",  I suppose, in the second case.)

           --gejyspa

[suke...@gmail.com]

Hum, my translations are veeeeery approximate, but that may mean:

Seeing the elephant being imprisoned by the hunters...

1. ...he defended him (...da pu bandu le xanto)

2. ...he took his tusk (...da pu lebna lo bacyde'i po'e le xanto)

Because "prendre la défense de" is both an expression meaning "to defend", and a way to say "to take (away) the elephant tusk" (~"tooth")

[Ilmen]

In French, the word «défense» exhibits polysemy; in this case it can be interpreted as "tusk" and so the sentence would mean "… and he took its tusk". However that seems contextually less likely that "he took its defense" as one would have expected the word "défense"/tusk to be in the plural, unless it is known that elephant had only one tusk.

—Ilmen.

[Michael Turniansky]

  Ah, to "detusk".  That was totally not in google translate's worldview.  Thanks

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[guskant]

coi la sykyndyr

I agree to the most part of your summary, though I have two points to suggest the precision.

Le jeudi 9 novembre 2017 20:48:20 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

* Lojban basics *

What defines Lojban? (Or "What should never change in Lojban?"). So, if I try to sum up again from various sources, the answers are below (please tell if you disagree):

YES!

• Non-ambiguous grammar (~= monoparsing, machine parsable)
  
• Unicity (~= forks are experiments or proposals)
  
• Cultural neutrality
  
• Partially based on logic
  
• Rather stable ("rather" has to be refined)
  
• Usable (speakable, learnable, writable, readable...)
  
• Usage defines the language, as long as these "basics" are untouched.
• However the "usage" is rather a blurry situation for now... 

 1. "Partially based on logic".

The phrase "based on logic" is not suitable qualification for a word that signifies a language.

A language is a set of symbols, while logic is a theory of reasoning according to which the meaning of a string of symbols is derived from the meaning of another string of symbols. In any kind of logic, the theory is defined so that a false cannot be derived from a truth.

Symbols are not meanings. A set of symbols cannot be based on a theory of meanings signified by symbols.

As a precise description of Lojban, the following sentence is suitable:

A part of the grammar of Lojban is based on the grammar of a language used in the predicate logic.

# By the way, the CLL defines also semantics of Lojban, among which there are something related to logic. However, the semantics written in the CLL contains very important logical defects, of which I raised the ideas of corrections in the BPFK meeting but failed to make them official. 

2. "Cultural neutrality"

The CLL defends it by creation of gismu based on the six languages of the majority on the Earth. However, as Gleki pointed out, the selection of gismu set is based on European culture. It lacks some important words for people in other cultures, for example {bambu} (listed on the jbovlaste as an experimental gismu) is not in the official gismu list, though it is a very important word for south east asian people.

However, from my point of view, the cultural neutrality of a language does not depend on the content words like gismu, but on the grammar.

Important content words should vary according to the speaker's lifestyle, the culture of each speaker. A cultural neutrality on gismu set is impossible. On the other hand, the grammar of Lojban is based on the grammar of language used in the predicate logic, which is very simplified and specialized in order to treat statements easily in logical reasoning. Such a grammar is indeed the cultural neutrality.

That's it, and the ideas above are based on my creation of a series of short films to be released soon. You all are lucky to know the ideas before release.

mu'o mi'e la guskant

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-10 15:22 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

{.i mi klama} = "I come, I came, I will have come" ? Ambiguous.

Ambiguous? I'd rather say "vague". I mean, for me, is is grammatically perfectly clear, despite no tense is provided.

Similar to your example  

"Sam likes you more that Max."

The link between Max and another noun is underspecified. Context makes clear what you mean.

Right. Or referring by name. When you need precision you add words, similar in Lojban.

Yup. I just told that there is no grammatical mean in French, whereas there are in Lojban. Of course, means may be cumbersome... and that's another point!

Lojban is not by definition free of polysemy.

Sure! But as a conlang with such base rules, polysemy has not the same "level", IMO.

I have no clue what you mean by "level"

 

That's where I agree in regard to French. Lojban and Mandarin Chinese have unambiguous self-segregation morphology provided that communication channel has low noise.

Really? I thought is was not that always the case. Anyway, I often hear, those says, people having much trouble with pronunciation (in French); this generally strongly affects the meaning. There are many famous pairs / paraphony ("et" / "est", "pomme" / "paume", etc.). This makes me think that tiny differences generate more issues.

In French they could. As I once again say I agree in regards to French. Other natural languages are similar to Lojban in self-segregating morphology.

 

 

I know Lojban allows the speaker to be vague, and allows usage of approximations. And it is also NOT a context-free grammar. But there is a huge gap between native languages and Lojban on the topic of ambiguity, IMO.

I hope my sarcastic but serious (ge'exo'o ge'ezo'onai) remarks proved that wrong.

Well, of course, no one can say "Lojban is perfect, everything else is crap". Lojban has issues. That's obvious. But what I mean is that Lojban tends to avoid some common issues in languages. The difference is not "day and night" of course. But I'm still not convinced that the gap is small, or that Lojban is "just another language".

However I must say all your remarks are interesting. Thanks again.

 

I don't know for other conlangs, actually. Thanks for the info ; I'll have a look. Please note I'm NOT trying to "define how Lojban is unique compared to others".

It'd be imo more productive to simply remove from the analysis anything that looks like a conlang (proglangs, Esperanto, gua\spi)

Alright!

Despite that more people speak Abkhaz than Lojban.

Yes. And...? What's the point?

Even if at some theoretical level Lojban is easier to learn no one learns it. It's like one of cryptic proglangs that geeks adore, discuss its pragmatic usefullness but almost no one uses.

Are you saying it's not worth learning Lojban?

I am not.

 

If so, your position is then unclear to me. Or are you saying that despite efforts people still see it as a doomed

I am not.

 

& geek language

I am.

 

(which is a bit what I said about "low notoriety")?

la .sykyndyr.

[John E Clifford]

Lojban’s claim to be based on logic is not significantly different from the similar claim for any language (sentences derived by transformations from underlying semantic representations which are often presented as formulae in some higher order intensional logic).  JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.  So, it is hardly culturally neutral in the sense suggested.  Of course, the need for cultural neutrality was prompted by the thoroughly bogus SWH, so its absence is not very damaging, except to the repeated claims to have it.  

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[Thomas Porter]

>The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or >China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.  So, it is hardly culturally neutral in the sense suggested.  

I'd love to see some non-Western and/or non-classical logical languages. Maybe someone should make a paraconsistent polysynthetic logical language...

[Mike S.]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 9:57 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

Thanks. I am interested in learning more about the history.  What FOL features did JCB ditch?  

In my view, the "skeleton" of Loglan looks like the result of tacking phonological forms onto FOL in what at the time must have seemed like the most obvious and straightforward manner, before the arrival of formal semantics.  After that, there came the business of trying to give Loglan the expressiveness of natural languages, which surely necessitated extending Loglan's grammar far beyond what could be represented in standard FOL, which was done in various ad-hoc ways.  All the while -- as I perceive it when I read some of JCB's writings -- there was evidently a preoccupation with the notion that Loglan could be used in a scientific research project to test the SWH, and the prospect of winning grant money for such a project.  I don't suspect this preoccupation with SWH served the cause of Loglan's logicalness very well. (Arguably, the time spent on mulling SWH could have been better spent on studying the work of formal semantics which was emerging in the 1980s.) 

But of course, I wasn't actually there, so what I say is merely my impression of the result and of the writings left behind.  As a side note, I don't see Lojban as being much like an SAE at all.  Real SAE conlangs look like Esperanto, and even more so, like IALA Interlingua.  Lojban is *sui generis*, IMO.

mi'e .maik.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-11 17:57 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com>:

Lojban’s claim to be based on logic is not significantly different from the similar claim for any language (sentences derived by transformations from underlying semantic representations which are often presented as formulae in some higher order intensional logic).  JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.

Yes, but Lojban compared to Loglan got somewhere further.

I'm not sure what you mean by Indian or Chinese logic (after all they still influenced European ones) but e.g.

1. second order logic is in CLL

2. combinatory logic with lambda calculus is a common topic (although xorlo reform with a bunch of simultaneous intrusions into plurality, grammar scope and quantifiers probably complicated the issue in Lojbanistan instead of clarifying it). But people can't stop mentioning Lojban when discussing combinatory logic.

3. trivalent logic was discussed although I'm not sure if it's compatible with CLL

4. higher order logic (FOPL - nouns/sumti, 2OPL - selbri/predicates, >2OPL - paragraphs) was again proposed as extensions to CLL

What else did we miss? Indian and Chinese logic is often mixed with philosophy, can you clarify where we haven't caught its logical part?

 

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[guskant]

Le samedi 11 novembre 2017 14:57:25 UTC, clifford a écrit :

Lojban’s claim to be based on logic is not significantly different from the similar claim for any language (sentences derived by transformations from underlying semantic representations which are often presented as formulae in some higher order intensional logic).  JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.  So, it is hardly culturally neutral in the sense suggested.  Of course, the need for cultural neutrality was prompted by the thoroughly bogus SWH, so its absence is not very damaging, except to the repeated claims to have it.  

coi la pycyn

Thank you for the historical information about Loglan and Lojban. However, I (and maybe la sykyndyr also) tried to "define" what to be called the current and the future Lojban. That "definition" may be shifted from JCB's or the later creaters' will.

As for my point of view of cultural neutrality, the facts of the ancient India and the ancient China you pointed out cannot negate my theory.

 Some of what are studied in the ancient Indian and the ancient China are now translated as "logic" into English because of the property of studies related to reasoning. However, the subjects of those studies are reasoning, not the symbols of Sanscrit or Hanzi. Those cultures did not invent what can be translated as "symbolic logic", in which a new language consisting of symbols simplified and specialized for expressing logic was invented. 

As I have already discussed, that language invented for European logic are not logic itself. That language, as well as Lojban, should be able to express the ancient Indian logic or the ancient Chinese logic by defining suitably logical axioms and rules of deduction, just like the modern expression of fraction $frac{1}{3}$ can express both European "one over three" and Chinese "san fen zhi yi"; the latter consists of "three", "separation", postposition that means "of", "one".

mi'e la guskant

[John E Clifford]

For a more thorough (though slightly out-of-date) version of all this, see The role of Error in the History of Loglans (in 8 parts or so) at pkipo.blogspot.com.

1.  What was the initial screw-up?  FOPL (or HOIL or whatever system you choose) depends upon a clear demarcation of different syntactic types (and the corresponding different semantics).  JCB, from the beginning, scrambled these types: quantifiers (sentence-makers with one variable and one sentence) are terms, conjunctions (sentence-makers with two sentences) are term-makers, modals, tenses and negation (sentence-makers with one sentence) are predicate makers and so on.  How is teh structure that allows a logical system to work to be found in all that muddle?  To be sure, in the interest of speakablity, some such changes will have to come about, but they are at the end of a process of derivation, not at the beginning.  Most of the 60 year Logjam construction process has been rying to patch up this gap -- and there is no evidence that it has succeeded -- or is even going in the right direction.  Monoparsing, yes (pretty much), but not evidence of correct monoparsing.

2. People who talk about SAE languages tend to forget what that term means in Sapir and Whorf.  The characteristic of SAE languages is summed up in literal surface reading of S: NP + VP.   The language consists of names of things embedded in a matrix words for properties and relations and actions.  This contrasts with the”purer” “primitive” language where sentences are just long complex verbs.  S n W circularly inferred that SAE speakers view the world (have a metaphysics)  of isolated things and their properties, relations, and activities, while the Hopi or Menominee or whatever view the world as made up of processes (what verbs refer to).  Logjam, in its various forms, is clearly of the former sort, terms and predicates.  The fact that every aspect of this distinction is simple hogwash doesn’t matter much, except that it does mean the Logjam was, from day one, useless for testing SWH and was (in SnW’s terms) not culturally neutral.

3.  To be sure, the logical traditions of India and China did not develop a set of extralinguistic symbols to deal with their notions.  However, they did use a rigorously controlled (oh, m,y how hard to get the rules right!) stylized version of the basic language (Sanskrit or Chinese or Tibetan) which could easily -- and has been -- converted to Western-style symbolic systems.  The concerns of these logical traditions (less clearly in China, where the tradition was crushed early on in the Confucian triumph) were the standard ones of logic: validity, entailment, third values and the like. Indian logic is clearly (and Chinese possibly) intensional, as opposed to the extensional core of Western logic.  It maybe that a HOIL (the assumed logic underlying languages) can enfold Indian logic without difficulty, but it has not yet done so (I think).  But Logjam, based on FOPL, is clearly not culturally neutral again.

Of course, I assume that reformers are constantly changing how Logjam is to be defined and what its goals and values and property are. So, maybe all the traditional ones are now passe’ But I am still waiting for the new list and wondering how that new list, if markedly different, can still claim to be about a language in the Loglan tradition.

 

[Mike S.]

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 8:58 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

For a more thorough (though slightly out-of-date) version of all this, see The role of Error in the History of Loglans (in 8 parts or so) at pkipo.blogspot.com.

http://pckipo.blogspot.com ;-)
 

mi'e .maik.

[John E Clifford]

Thanks

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-12 4:58 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com>:

For a more thorough (though slightly out-of-date) version of all this, see The role of Error in the History of Loglans (in 8 parts or so) at pkipo.blogspot.com.

1.  What was the initial screw-up?  FOPL (or HOIL or whatever system you choose) depends upon a clear demarcation of different syntactic types (and the corresponding different semantics).  JCB, from the beginning, scrambled these types: quantifiers (sentence-makers with one variable and one sentence) are terms, conjunctions (sentence-makers with two sentences) are term-makers, modals, tenses and negation (sentence-makers with one sentence) are predicate makers and so on.  How is teh structure that allows a logical system to work to be found in all that muddle?

That's certainly true (although wouldn't a language relexing western logical notation be even harder than lojban to speak? that'd be rather easy to test).

 

 To be sure, in the interest of speakablity, some such changes will have to come about, but they are at the end of a process of derivation, not at the beginning.  Most of the 60 year Logjam construction process has been rying to patch up this gap -- and there is no evidence that it has succeeded -- or is even going in the right direction.  Monoparsing, yes (pretty much), but not evidence of correct monoparsing.

What would constitute correct monoparsing?

 

2. People who talk about SAE languages tend to forget what that term means in Sapir and Whorf.  The characteristic of SAE languages is summed up in literal surface reading of S: NP + VP.   The language consists of names of things embedded in a matrix words for properties and relations and actions.  This contrasts with the”purer” “primitive” language where sentences are just long complex verbs.  S n W circularly inferred that SAE speakers view the world (have a metaphysics)  of isolated things and their properties, relations, and activities, while the Hopi or Menominee or whatever view the world as made up of processes (what verbs refer to).

However, isn't the notion of "process" is SWH-ish by itself? Is some language has processes only and no properties and objects how to even compare from it to other languages?

And if a Western language has all of the three notions then it's easy to invent new words semantically similar but being verbs? Which Lojban did with its {ti badna} = "This thing is bananaing", {mi ninmu} = "I am woman-ning".

 Logjam, in its various forms, is clearly of the former sort, terms and predicates.

Do you mean that some languages (like Wakashan ones) do not have predicates but instead pile morphemes up without dedicated markers showing roles of arguments of predicates (which thus do not exist) in an attempt that the meaning gets along, which of course de facto does?

 

 The fact that every aspect of this distinction is simple hogwash doesn’t matter much, except that it does mean the Logjam was, from day one, useless for testing SWH and was (in SnW’s terms) not culturally neutral.

3.  To be sure, the logical traditions of India and China did not develop a set of extralinguistic symbols to deal with their notions.  However, they did use a rigorously controlled (oh, m,y how hard to get the rules right!) stylized version of the basic language (Sanskrit or Chinese or Tibetan) which could easily -- and has been -- converted to Western-style symbolic systems.  The concerns of these logical traditions (less clearly in China, where the tradition was crushed early on in the Confucian triumph) were the standard ones of logic: validity, entailment, third values and the like. Indian logic is clearly (and Chinese possibly) intensional

JCB dealt with possible worlds too (which is clearly related to intensional logic).

That was in early 90s.

, as opposed to the extensional core of Western logic.  It maybe that a HOIL (the assumed logic underlying languages) can enfold Indian logic without difficulty, but it has not yet done so (I think).  But Logjam, based on FOPL, is clearly not culturally neutral again.

Of course, I assume that reformers are constantly changing how Logjam is to be defined and what its goals and values and property are. So, maybe all the traditional ones are now passe’ But I am still waiting for the new list and wondering how that new list, if markedly different, can still claim to be about a language in the Loglan tradition.

A list of what? New features? Which new features? 

 

On Saturday, November 11, 2017, 5:08:14 PM CST, guskant <gusni...@gmail.com> wrote:

Le samedi 11 novembre 2017 14:57:25 UTC, clifford a écrit :

Lojban’s claim to be based on logic is not significantly different from the similar claim for any language (sentences derived by transformations from underlying semantic representations which are often presented as formulae in some higher order intensional logic).  JCB ditched most of the features of FOPL (the best then available) which gave for precision and most of the last 60 years has been spent trying to get at least some of that back (not yet all by a long shot).  Lojban is just an SAE language that looks a little strange because position in a sentence does not have a fixed meaning but rather depends upon the verb at the center.  End of borrowings from logic (hyperbole, but not much).

The logic on which Lojban is “based” is again a European creation (mainly Anglo-American and German, with a little French and Italian).  It takes no account of the logical traditions of India or China nor of the specialized languages developed there for logic.  So, it is hardly culturally neutral in the sense suggested.  Of course, the need for cultural neutrality was prompted by the thoroughly bogus SWH, so its absence is not very damaging, except to the repeated claims to have it.  

coi la pycyn

Thank you for the historical information about Loglan and Lojban. However, I (and maybe la sykyndyr also) tried to "define" what to be called the current and the future Lojban. That "definition" may be shifted from JCB's or the later creaters' will.

As for my point of view of cultural neutrality, the facts of the ancient India and the ancient China you pointed out cannot negate my theory.

 Some of what are studied in the ancient Indian and the ancient China are now translated as "logic" into English because of the property of studies related to reasoning. However, the subjects of those studies are reasoning, not the symbols of Sanscrit or Hanzi. Those cultures did not invent what can be translated as "symbolic logic", in which a new language consisting of symbols simplified and specialized for expressing logic was invented. 

As I have already discussed, that language invented for European logic are not logic itself. That language, as well as Lojban, should be able to express the ancient Indian logic or the ancient Chinese logic by defining suitably logical axioms and rules of deduction, just like the modern expression of fraction $frac{1}{3}$ can express both European "one over three" and Chinese "san fen zhi yi"; the latter consists of "three", "separation", postposition that means "of", "one".

mi'e la guskant

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[Ilmen]

Incidentally, there is a work-in-progress piece of software that aim to translate back and forth between Lojban and a custom logical notation ; the project is called Tersmu: https://gitorious.org/tersmu/tersmu/

There's an interface to it on IRC, it's clearly not finished but is already pretty good.

Here's a few samples of input-output:

• ro mlatu cu mabru
» ∀x1:(mlatu(_)). mabru(x1)

• .e'a do xagji na gi'a citka su'o da
» (xagji(do) → ∃x1. citka(do,x1))

• na ku ro plise cu xunre
» ¬∀x1:(plise(_)). xunre(x1)

• ro te cange poi ponse su'o xasli cu darxi ri
» ∀x1:((cange( , ,_) ∧ ∃x2:(xasli(_)). ponse(_,x2))). darxi(x1,{ri})

[Martin Bays]

* Sunday, 2017-11-12 at 12:55 +0100 - Ilmen <ilmen....@gmail.com>:

> Incidentally, there is a work-in-progress piece of software that aim to
> translate back and forth between Lojban and a custom logical notation ; the
> project is called Tersmu: https://gitorious.org/tersmu/tersmu/

I should probably clarify that work on it isn't really in progress any
more, at least not by its original author (me). I'll try to maintain
it, but I can't imagine getting back to working on it seriously any
year soon. So I encourage anyone interested in developing the project
further to fork it.

[John E Clifford]

Well, let’s see.

1.  No one is suggesting a lexed version of FOPL or HOIL as a language, although, as one who spoke one fairly regularly for thirty-some years, I can say that it is not too bad (certainly not worse than Lojban in the areas both cover).  The biggest problem is repetition, since you have to say everything the same way every time.  So, the first steps in deriving a language from  formulae, unequivocal repetition replacement: fusion and prowords, mainly. After that, the rest is icing.  Oh, and adding a bunch of conversational expressions.   

2.  The theory goes that every sentence in any language derives by a series of transformations from a semantic representation, viewed as a formula in an adequate HOIL.  A correct parse, then, is one that gets back to that original formula (up to the relevant logical equivalence). Practically, this seems to mean that the derivations involved are all biunique.  Of course, none of this discussion applies to Lojban, since it does not define its sentences against a semantic base (though, of course, it has one).

3.  The descriptions of languages used in the discussion of SWH are those of surface phenomena as described in the first half of the 20th century and bear very little relation to what a linguist might do today (one would hope). In particular, all sentences of all languages have the same sort of underlying representation and differ only in the selection of transformation used to get to them, so the SAE etc. classifications, have no profound reality.  Nor do they reflect different ways of viewing the world, as revealed in non-linguistic tests.  

4.  As noted, Nyaya Sanskrit is as formal a language as FOPL, just written in Sanskrit words not non-linguistic symbols. Spoken FOPL is in English (etc.) words but not the less formal for that. Nyaya could be symboized in a HOIL fairly easily, I think (I stopped that dissertation before I got that far, alas), so could be enfolded in Lojban, if Lojban were actually based on HOIL (or even a suitably extended version of FOPL). 

5.  I confess that, aside from constantly fiddling with minutiae, I have no idea what reformers have as a vision for Lojban 2.0 or whatever.  Does it still aim at the old goals, has it dropped some, has it added others, is it totally different? Of course, over the years even the goals of the CLL fundamentalists have become increasingly less clear as even they diddle with this cmavo or that, even this. selma’o or that.  All ultimately to no particularly interesting point, so far as I can see from what is floating around now.  

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-12 22:12 GMT+03:00 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com>:

5.  I confess that, aside from constantly fiddling with minutiae, I have no idea what reformers have as a vision for Lojban 2.0 or whatever.  Does it still aim at the old goals, has it dropped some, has it added others, is it totally different? Of course, over the years even the goals of the CLL fundamentalists have become increasingly less clear as even they diddle with this cmavo or that, even this. selma’o or that.  All ultimately to no particularly interesting point, so far as I can see from what is floating around now.  

I think it dropped the idea of spoken auxiliary language, added the idea of programming/mathematical auxiliary language (proof system). I think SWH is not dropped but mostly viewed as a poorly formulated hypothesis

[suke...@gmail.com]

Wow. I mean "Waaaaaaow!": you guys & gals seem to have "somewhat deeply" study subject of languages, logic, predicates, morphisms, philosophy... and a few other words I'm not 100% sure I understand the contours (maybe my English level?). Of course, you may say that you did not dive as deep as you wanted ;) ...

I also have the feeling that two reading levels arose: the "technical" discussion, and the "user" discussion.

I would certainly not break up the discussion, so please go on with the "technical" level: that brings very interesting things.

But as interesting it is, I'd also like to come to a very low-brow / down-to-earth / "simple" user point of view. That was actually what I wanted to do with my basic summary. Gleki and guskant pointed out interesting imprecisions/mistakes (thank you both), and others added many details (thank you too). So, may I try again?

http://sukender.free.fr/articles/2017-11-13%20Lojban%20fundamentals.xhtml

In this version:

• I'm still keeping it readable by "anyone" (actually a potential new Lojbanist with absolutely no specific knowledge related to it).
  
• This time, I'm not writing what Lojban "is". I rather had similar content with a bit more distant approach: I'm telling the "work about Lojban tended to (...blah blah...) and any change should not break up those fundamentals". That's slightly different. That way, I can tackle the two points Gleki rightly pointed out:
  

1. "Culturally neutral" is okay as long as it is an clear it is an intent, and that it is something really partial.
2. Document is both about description and politics of future Lojban.

• Last point implies neutrality of the document (which may be difficult). I'm trying to keep it neutral regarding to various expressed points of view in this thread. Said otherwise: I try to catch what supposedly "reformists" and "fundamentalists" (sorry for the names) agree on, as for an external observer. As la .pycyn. pointed out, none of those two "goals" are clear.
  

Please provide any critics, on the form and substance. You'll see I added yellow highlighting: those items are clearly to be debated/adjusted.

And maybe a section with "major" (!) ways of thinking the furure of Lojban should be expressed?...

Hope to read you soon.

Cheers,

la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-13 13:44 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

Please provide any critics, on the form and substance.

You are saying that Lojban has "Non-ambiguous grammar" and "Formal grammar". These can be reduced to "Lojban grammar is prescriptive, the grammar of English is descriptive, which opens a road to any cheating in comparison of those two languages"

[suke...@gmail.com]

Er, well... here I was trying to tell both about non-ambiguity and the fact that the grammar is not 100% formal, as you told. Any idea about what I can write to improve the thing, being at the same time "simple enough", accurate, and avoid comparison with English? Thanks!

[Michael Turniansky]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 5:44 AM, <suke...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow. I mean "Waaaaaaow!": you guys & gals seem to have "somewhat deeply" study subject of languages, logic, predicates, morphisms, philosophy... and a few other words I'm not 100% sure I understand the contours (maybe my English level?). Of course, you may say that you did not dive as deep as you wanted ;) ...

  Don't worry.  I've been speaking English for 54+ years, and I never understand that stuff, either.  It's not English, it's either linguistics, logic, or logicolinguistics.  That's why I never get mired in these threads, because it always devolves into that stuff.

            --gejyspa

 

[suke...@gmail.com]

Le lundi 13 novembre 2017 15:00:58 UTC+1, gejyspa a écrit :

  Don't worry.  I've been speaking English for 54+ years, and I never understand that stuff, either.  It's not English, it's either linguistics, logic, or logicolinguistics.  That's why I never get mired in these threads, because it always devolves into that stuff.

Ha ha ha! Maybe the low-brow summary I try to figure out is then more important than I thought?

la .sykyndyr.

[And Rosta]

On 8 Nov 2017 12:54, "Timothy Lawrence" <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au> wrote:

> We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent,

What do you mean?

CLL does not give complete and consistent rules for unambiguously mapping Lojban sentences to logical forms. For folk for whom Lojban's purportedly being a logical language is its paramount property, that is a big deal. 

Is there something that documents this?

I don't know. It's certainly there in the mail archives and antique wiki pages. Selpahi read through 25 years of email and wiki discussion in order to understand the issues. 

My sense is that the folk who care about logic are more interested simply in mending the language rather than in creating documents that focus on explaining in one place all the problems with CLL Lojban, but there may well be newer expository stuff I don't know about.

A complicating factor is that not only is the community divided into those who care about logic and those who don't (and can therefore favour CLL Lojban), those who care about logic are in turn divided into those who want to make the minimum changes to CLL Lojban to sort out the logical issues and those who think that if you're going to make any changes at all then you might as well fix some of the most egregious design flaws in order to make the language much more user-friendly. Essentially the two positions weigh the effort invested by the few people who have learnt CLL thoroughly against the much larger but more hypothetical number who might learn and use Lojban in future.

> is not complete,

I agree and would like to help complete it.

This is the job of the BPFK, but not much progres is visible from that group.

In my view, xorxes and selpahi should simply define bodies of candidate new rules and changes and the rest of the BPFK or community or LLG should vote on them by some suitably intelligent voting method. You could make it more democratic by allowing anyone to submit proposed changes, but I would be inclined to vote for exactly whatever xorxes and selpahi propose. Those innovations elected would be deemed to supersede CLL where there is incompatibility. And then textbook writers can write it up. Admittedly, that already happened for xorlo, but nobody has yet textbooked it.

--And.

[Remo Dentato]

Adopting the connective system proposed by selpahi, imho, is one of the first proposal to be evaluated.  I really believe that CLL system is far too unpractical for common usage.

 That would be a clear move toward a "modern" version of Lojban.

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[suke...@gmail.com]

And, you told that there are 3 groups. If I rephrase:

1. CLL 1.1 "purists", who want to "throw away" what has been learned
   
2. The ones who want to "bug fix" CLL regarding to logic.
   
3. The ones who want to "upgrade" CLL.

It is not clear to me if 2nd and 3rd ideas would break up many things (thus forcing to "re-learn" when having learned CLL 1.1), or only details. Somebody has clues on this?

(And yes, each potential change would have to be evaluated on that question.)

Aside from that, I feel that the 2nd and 3rd group should agree to perform first common steps altogether. Isn't it the case? If not, why?

la .sykyndyr.

[suke...@gmail.com]

Please read "... who want to NOT throw away..."

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-15 12:37 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

And, you told that there are 3 groups. If I rephrase:

1. CLL 1.1 "purists", who want to "NOT throw away" what has been learned
   

1. The ones who want to "bug fix" CLL regarding to logic.
   
2. The ones who want to "upgrade" CLL.

It is not clear to me if 2nd and 3rd ideas would break up many things (thus forcing to "re-learn" when having learned CLL 1.1), or only details. Somebody has clues on this?

How do 2.3. necessarily conflict with 1.?

There are several levels of deviation from CLL: https://jbotcan.org/lojban/en/dialects/ (which ignores internal conflicts of CLL, which is your group 2.). 

E.g. 

krtisfrank's connectives are a Dialect, type 2.

xorxe's connectives are probably a Dialect, type 3.

solpahi's connectives are a Dialect, type 4.

(And yes, each potential change would have to be evaluated on that question.)

Aside from that, I feel that the 2nd and 3rd group should agree to perform first common steps altogether. Isn't it the case? If not, why?

la .sykyndyr.

Le lundi 13 novembre 2017 16:44:47 UTC+1, And Rosta a écrit :

On 8 Nov 2017 12:54, "Timothy Lawrence" <timothy....@connect.qut.edu.au> wrote:

> We have long known that CLL Lojban is not logically unambiguous, is not internally consistent,

What do you mean?

CLL does not give complete and consistent rules for unambiguously mapping Lojban sentences to logical forms. For folk for whom Lojban's purportedly being a logical language is its paramount property, that is a big deal. 

Is there something that documents this?

I don't know. It's certainly there in the mail archives and antique wiki pages. Selpahi read through 25 years of email and wiki discussion in order to understand the issues. 

My sense is that the folk who care about logic are more interested simply in mending the language rather than in creating documents that focus on explaining in one place all the problems with CLL Lojban, but there may well be newer expository stuff I don't know about.

A complicating factor is that not only is the community divided into those who care about logic and those who don't (and can therefore favour CLL Lojban), those who care about logic are in turn divided into those who want to make the minimum changes to CLL Lojban to sort out the logical issues and those who think that if you're going to make any changes at all then you might as well fix some of the most egregious design flaws in order to make the language much more user-friendly. Essentially the two positions weigh the effort invested by the few people who have learnt CLL thoroughly against the much larger but more hypothetical number who might learn and use Lojban in future.

> is not complete,

I agree and would like to help complete it.

This is the job of the BPFK, but not much progres is visible from that group.

In my view, xorxes and selpahi should simply define bodies of candidate new rules and changes and the rest of the BPFK or community or LLG should vote on them by some suitably intelligent voting method. You could make it more democratic by allowing anyone to submit proposed changes, but I would be inclined to vote for exactly whatever xorxes and selpahi propose. Those innovations elected would be deemed to supersede CLL where there is incompatibility. And then textbook writers can write it up. Admittedly, that already happened for xorlo, but nobody has yet textbooked it.

--And.

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[suke...@gmail.com]

It is not clear to me if 2nd and 3rd ideas would break up many things (thus forcing to "re-learn" when having learned CLL 1.1), or only details. Somebody has clues on this?

How do 2.3. necessarily conflict with 1.?

Well, it is linked to what timoteios told about backward-compatibility. So yes, you're right. There may be "non breaking" changes. But I guess that 2. and 3. are not 100% free of breaking changes. Don't you think? Or maybe the situation is to be looked at from a different angle (regarding to the impact of changes)?

Furthermore, what is an "acceptable" breaking change is very subtle and subjective. Examples:

• Changing details about maths may affect more engineers and researchers than others.
  
• Beginners will be less impacted by breaking changes than long-standing speakers. I have personally read the whole CLL 1.1 and learned with it. However I'm still a beginner and the impact of changes is rather low for me (for now...).
  
• Changing details about attidudinals may affect more Asian-languages native speakers than European-languages ones (not sure of that, but sounds reasonable).
• (and surely much more...)

 

There are several levels of deviation from CLL: https://jbotcan.org/lojban/en/dialects/ (which ignores internal conflicts of CLL, which is your group 2.). 

E.g. 

krtisfrank's connectives are a Dialect, type 2.

xorxe's connectives are probably a Dialect, type 3.

solpahi's connectives are a Dialect, type 4.

Thanks for the info. I guess those "types" are closely related to the "level" of breaking changes, but are not the same.

What to you think about this?

Finally, maybe that "level" could be evaluated with a "grid" (ie. multiple "grades" about various impact topics), being unique for all submissions. For example:

• How much does it change the grammar? (ex: 0/5, 1/5...)
• How much does it change existing words?
• How much does it increase the vocabulary (word count)?
• How close new words/rules are to existing ones?
• (etc.)

This may help reviewing, by allowing only low global grades.

Just my 2 cents on this point! ;)

la .sykyndyr.

[guskant]

Le mercredi 15 novembre 2017 09:38:00 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

And, you told that there are 3 groups. If I rephrase:

1. CLL 1.1 "purists", who want to "throw away" what has been learned
   
2. The ones who want to "bug fix" CLL regarding to logic.
   
3. The ones who want to "upgrade" CLL.

It is not clear to me if 2nd and 3rd ideas would break up many things (thus forcing to "re-learn" when having learned CLL 1.1), or only details. Somebody has clues on this?

(And yes, each potential change would have to be evaluated on that question.)

Aside from that, I feel that the 2nd and 3rd group should agree to perform first common steps altogether. Isn't it the case? If not, why?

la .sykyndyr.

 

I regard that And Rosta is one of the great contributors for refining the theory behind Lojban, but he seems to take a distance from the current active Lojban speakers. He once kindly gave me his thoughts on my documetary film {lo vliraitru}, but I guess he doesn't know much about the current 2nd or 3rd group.

I also take a distance from active speakers, but I still observe the community from time to time. Here are what I understand according to the observation.

- Group 2 and Group 3 consist mostly of the same people. That is to say, There are few people in Group 2 who are not in Group 3. Group 3 consists of some incompatible groups. The members of Group 3 have agreement on "bug fix"-ing the CLL regarding to logic.

- Group 1 should permit "adding grammatical mechanisms" without changing the existing mechanism, because it is clearly permitted in Section 4.2 of the CLL. However, it seems to me that some people in Group 1 don't accept any new grammatical mechanisms.

Now, Group 3, including Group 2, should "perform first common steps altogether", but it isn't the case: there is poor progress in "bug fix"-ing. I observed again the BPFK meeting, and recognized some points that might be useful for considering the solution of problems.

Summary.

1. Discussions for removing grammatical defects were more active than those for removing semantic defects. See Observations 1 and 3 below.

2. Discussions for removing semantic defects are always stopped at some stage, no voting, and buried in many other topics of simple Q&As. See Observations 3 and 4 below.

3. The Lojban Coders' Group has no intention of cooperating with BPFK. See Observation 2.1 below.

Suggestion.

Summary 1 and 2 suggest that we need an easy-to-use working system, where the members clearly see what to be put for voting, what to be discussed, what are important, what are unimportant.

Summary 3 suggests a problem more difficult to solve. Some members of BPFK are members of the Lojban Coders' Group. They don't distinguish missions of BPFK from voluntary services. I have no idea to change their mind.

Observations.

1. Some defects in grammar were discussed and voting occurred.

Examples:

1.1. YACC to PEG

(discussion from 2015-11-17 to 2016-05-19)

In order to remove some defects in grammar, it is necessary to make the grammar written in PEG official, because YACC is less expressive than PEG [Note 1]. 

There was a stubborn resistant, but voting occurred. As a result, The proposal that the grammar written in PEG should be official got the majority.

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bpfk-list/A8qyiW7Uod8/GN7F-pZXCgAJ

However, I didn't see any official declaration about the result.

1.2. ([{lo <nu (¹broda VAU¹) KEI> KU} CU] [{ba brode} VAU])

(discussion from 2015-11-16 to 2016-03-15)

Most members agreed that it should be official and voted for it. The result was declared:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bpfk-list/A8qyiW7Uod8/jRLrsM9WDQAJ

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK:_lo_nu_broda_ba_brode

2. Not all modifications to the grammar were put for voting.

Examples:

2.1. {broda be ba brode}

(discussion from 2016-02-23 to 2016-04-06)

It becomes ungrammatical under the agreement 1.2 above.

The proposal of making it grammatical again by modifying some parts of the grammar was not accepted by some people including me, and the discussion stopped without voting.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/kXZ5aBNPI_A/discussion

However, the Lojban Coders' Group made it grammatical on Camxes on 2016-03-27, and it is still valid:

https://github.com/lojban/ilmentufa/commit/e9f578607dcc1a1dddfa8f9132175f5bc22c7b4d#diff-373e39fcf7056e72d5e0e4cdab4068f3

Even after the voting for the above proposal 1.1 of making PEG grammar official, that Camxes is modified little by little without consulting BPFK, though called "camxes: standard" on the parser page:

https://github.com/lojban/ilmentufa/commits/master/camxes.peg

http://lojban.github.io/ilmentufa/camxes.html

That fact shows that any decisions by BPFK have no influence to the contents created by the Lojban Coders' Group, still the Lojban Coders' Group is deceiving users into believing that their "camxes: standard" reflected the official grammar.

2.2. {ni'o .i}

(discussion from 2016-03-11 to 2016-03-30)

The idea of making it grammatical was discussed and mostly agreed but no voting occurred. Maybe the topic was not very important for the members of BPFK.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/nk049jbIBlQ/discussion

3. Defects in semantics are discussed but voting has never occurred.

Examples:

3.1. Removing defects in meaning of {na}

(discussion from 2016-06-23 to 2016-07-02)

Most people agreed, some did not, and the discussion was stopped for no reason.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/svR3FuAr0pA/discussion

3.2. meaning of {bridi}

(discussions: from 2014-10-07 to 2014-10-09; from 2016-01-19 to 2016-05-30)

It was once agreed by 2014-10-09 that {bridi} is relationship of meanings, not of symbols. 

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/yChr3cGT1_Q/discussion

It was discussed again in 2016, mostly agreed again, but no voting occurred.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/V1TNzpGE3XI/discussion

3.3. meaning of causation sumtcita

(discussion from 2015-05-13 to 2015-06-17)

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/FdM1mYXfn3s/discussion

It was discussed, the document was given, but no voting occurred.

4. There are many simple Q&A that don't require voting.

Examples:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/CLJ21LkJ9jw/discussion

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/rHreOMRRpKs/discussion

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/wz5_QcTTC8U/discussion

and many more.

[Note 1]

Such an example is explained at 35m15s of the documentary video:

https://vimeo.com/190637628#t=2115s

[Sukender]

I'll answer more in detail soon, but in the meantime, can you tell us more about "Group 3 consist[ing] of some incompatible groups"? Which subgroups, actually?
ki'e

la .sykyndyr.

[guskant]

Le jeudi 16 novembre 2017 16:21:09 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

I'll answer more in detail soon, but in the meantime, can you tell us more about "Group 3 consist[ing] of some incompatible groups"? Which subgroups, actually?
ki'e

la .sykyndyr.

The earliest subgroup of Group 3 is supporters of Zasni Gerna of Xorxes:

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zasni_gerna

The second wave should be supporters of Solpahi's connective sistem:

http://selpahi.weebly.com/lojban/how-to-substantially-simplify-the-lojban-connective-system-my-connective-system

The third wave should be my Zantufa. It implemented most of both Xorxes's and Solpahi's, and modified much more the forethought connectives and the mathematical expressions.

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zantufa_jonma%27o_smuni

https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zantufa_mekso

Gleki mentioned the function words proposed by Curtis Franks as if they would belong to Group 3, but those modifications should be regarded as a part of the CLL according to the description in Section 4.2 of it: "adding grammatical mechanisms".

There are also many proposals used by people chatting in IRC lojban group, but most of them seem to be in the category of Section 4.2 of the CLL as well.

mi'e la Guskant

[Ilmen]

On 16/11/2017 17:06, guskant wrote:

2. Not all modifications to the grammar were put for voting.

Examples:

2.1. {broda be ba brode}

(discussion from 2016-02-23 to 2016-04-06)

It becomes ungrammatical under the agreement 1.2 above.

The proposal of making it grammatical again by modifying some parts of the grammar was not accepted by some people including me, and the discussion stopped without voting.

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bpfk-list/kXZ5aBNPI_A/discussion

As I understand it, in the BPFK thread {lo nu broda ba brode}, a majority of people voiced in favor of {lo nu broda ba brode} to become equal to {lo nu broda cu ba brode}. I don't think this entails by itself that {broda be ba brode} is no longer grammatical.
But if a clarification on that point is needed, we can have the BPFK vote on whether {broda be ba brode} should be grammatical or not.

—Ilmen.

[guskant]

doi la ilmen

I oppose myself to your understanding for the following reason:

I posted what to be modified on Camxes for {lo nu broda ba brode}, with an alert that it will make some features ungrammatical:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bpfk-list/A8qyiW7Uod8/4WsRMNL7BAAJ

while you did not posted your modification on Camxes for {broda be ba brode} on the thread for {lo nu broda ba brode}:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/bpfk-list/kXZ5aBNPI_A/K8Hcl6h8EQAJ

Thus your modification on Camxes was not discussed for {lo nu broda ba brode}, while my modification was discussed for it.

I don't prevent you from restarting the discussion for {broda be ba brode} on the bpfk-list, though.

mi'e la guskant

[suke...@gmail.com]

It seems groups are much fuzzier than expected. Individual may accept to:

• Improve, non backward-compatible way (= anything)
  
• Bug-fix, non backward-compatible way
  
• Improve, backward-compatible way (including additions)
  
• Do nothing at all
  

These choices may apply to logic and grammar, leading to 4^2 = 16 possible combinations, even though some combinations are highly improbable and some others contain simply very few people (as la .guskant. said about former "group 2"). If we add "semantics" to logic and grammar, we get to 4^3 = 64. And if we add "No idea on the topic" as a choice, we got 5^3 = 125.

And inside some combinations, we find people in favor of X or Y proposition (Zasni Gerna of Xorxes, Solpahi's connectives, Zantufa...). which increases again the number of cases.

(Please note that I did not add "Bug-fix, backward-compatible" because from what I read, it seems merely impossible (correct me if I'm wrong). Else we'd have 6^3 = 216.)

So better not trying to but people in 3 "labeled compartments", I guess! That leads me to the conclusion that submissions must be evaluated on a per-case basis, with a stable and well-known evaluation grid.

***

Now about organizations.

I feel like the separation between BPFK and the GIT repositories maintained by the Coders' Group is nonsense (from an pure organizational point of view). I foresee multiple possible outcomes:

1. Nothing changes: BPFK discusses/votes things that will never be included, and the Coders' Group include things that will never be discussed/voted. Lojban dies.
   
2. Pure schism: each group "wakes up" (=becomes more active) and decides to build its own language. What will emerge is unclear to me. One sure thing is that the small community will be split into two (or more) weaker ones.
   
3. Put in common:
   

• By cooperation: groups (or some members) agree to work together (or merge) with proper means, common rules and common tools. That requires adhesion and (good) tools.
• Cooperation may happen with renewal: groups may agree to create a new entity with new (or updated) rules.
• By dissolution: one group may simply dissolve, leaving the other one the only "official". I personally think this is dangerous because we surely need the point of view of everybody.
• By forcing: One group may force the other to accept its own way to work. The most obvious case would be preempting ("pull the rug out to"): BPFK could fork repositories and tag them as "BPFK Official" or whatever. This is unfair, but perfectly legal.

Of course, cases may be partial and mixed: some members may join the other group, while other create a new entity or a new language, etc. I just hope people won't be dumb enough to create a worse situation.

(The terms you were looking for are "compromises" and "trade-off"... ;-) )

That leads me to the conclusion that submission protocol/rules are to be proposed, discussed and accepted by a wide range of people. I won't enter pure language discussions, as I don't feel legitimate for this. But I'll try to propose solutions to help about rules and protocols. Any idea is welcome of course.

la .sykyndyr.

[guskant]

Le vendredi 17 novembre 2017 12:56:14 UTC, Benoit Neil a écrit :

It seems groups are much fuzzier than expected. Individual may accept to:

• Improve, non backward-compatible way (= anything)
  
• Bug-fix, non backward-compatible way
  
• Improve, backward-compatible way (including additions)
  
• Do nothing at all
  

These choices may apply to logic and grammar, leading to 4^2 = 16 possible combinations, even though some combinations are highly improbable and some others contain simply very few people (as la .guskant. said about former "group 2"). If we add "semantics" to logic and grammar, we get to 4^3 = 64. And if we add "No idea on the topic" as a choice, we got 5^3 = 125.

And inside some combinations, we find people in favor of X or Y proposition (Zasni Gerna of Xorxes, Solpahi's connectives, Zantufa...). which increases again the number of cases.

(Please note that I did not add "Bug-fix, backward-compatible" because from what I read, it seems merely impossible (correct me if I'm wrong). Else we'd have 6^3 = 216.)

So better not trying to but people in 3 "labeled compartments", I guess! That leads me to the conclusion that submissions must be evaluated on a per-case basis, with a stable and well-known evaluation grid.

***

Now about organizations.

I feel like the separation between BPFK and the GIT repositories maintained by the Coders' Group is nonsense (from an pure organizational point of view). I foresee multiple possible outcomes:

1. Nothing changes: BPFK discusses/votes things that will never be included, and the Coders' Group include things that will never be discussed/voted. Lojban dies.
   
2. Pure schism: each group "wakes up" (=becomes more active) and decides to build its own language. What will emerge is unclear to me. One sure thing is that the small community will be split into two (or more) weaker ones.
   
3. Put in common:
   

• By cooperation: groups (or some members) agree to work together (or merge) with proper means, common rules and common tools. That requires adhesion and (good) tools.
• Cooperation may happen with renewal: groups may agree to create a new entity with new (or updated) rules.
• By dissolution: one group may simply dissolve, leaving the other one the only "official". I personally think this is dangerous because we surely need the point of view of everybody.
• By forcing: One group may force the other to accept its own way to work. The most obvious case would be preempting ("pull the rug out to"): BPFK could fork repositories and tag them as "BPFK Official" or whatever. This is unfair, but perfectly legal.

Of course, cases may be partial and mixed: some members may join the other group, while other create a new entity or a new language, etc. I just hope people won't be dumb enough to create a worse situation.

(The terms you were looking for are "compromises" and "trade-off"... ;-) )

That leads me to the conclusion that submission protocol/rules are to be proposed, discussed and accepted by a wide range of people. I won't enter pure language discussions, as I don't feel legitimate for this. But I'll try to propose solutions to help about rules and protocols. Any idea is welcome of course.

la .sykyndyr.

I prefer 3, "putting in common by cooperation". However, the Lojban Coders' Group seems to have no rule, and each member of the group behaves as he likes. Some of them are already inactive. Even if the BPFK decides to make contact with the Lojban Coders' Group, they will not be able to reach an agreement of the whole group.

I once tried the similar action as "putting in common by forcing" by posting a motion to the LLG meeting. My motion was to rescue the official information from lojban.org, and to manage them by a new organisation on github consisting of all members of LLG and no other persons. The new LLG page on the github should declare that the official body has no responsibility for the contents on lojban.org, lojban.github.io, la-lojban.github.io and any other websites. Any voluntary groups will thus be liberated from any requirements for maintaining the official contents, and will not be blamed for the false or inaccurate contents. Any learners of Lojban will thus have easy access to the official contents without searching deeply into the chaotic lojban.org or comparing the parser sources with Chapter 21 of the CLL.

That motion was implicitly seconded by Gleki (he agreed to a method that requires the motion being adopted, but made no comments on the motion itself), and not opposed by Curtis Franks, but the meeting was forcedly closed without any discussion or voting.

The LLG meeting thus died. I will try again the similar motion on the current LLG meeting, but it is likely to be ignored again guessing from their behavior to my past motions. I may try the BPFK meeting to discuss your analysis, even though it is also dying.

ki'e sai la sykyndyr

mi'e la guskant

 

[suke...@gmail.com]

I prefer 3, "putting in common by cooperation". However, the Lojban Coders' Group seems to have no rule, and each member of the group behaves as he likes. Some of them are already inactive. Even if the BPFK decides to make contact with the Lojban Coders' Group, they will not be able to reach an agreement of the whole group.

Are you saying the Coders' Group is not a group, but rather an "unsorted" list of accounts? If so, I understand why preempting would be more probable than I thought. However, it could be fair to ask everyone first. But I understand inactive accounts are an issue. BTW, I integrated the problem in my thinking about how to help organizing all of this (coming soon).

I once tried the similar action as "putting in common by forcing" by posting a motion to the LLG meeting. [...]

That motion was implicitly seconded by Gleki (he agreed to a method that requires the motion being adopted, but made no comments on the motion itself), and not opposed by Curtis Franks, but the meeting was forcedly closed without any discussion or voting.

Why closed?

 

The LLG meeting thus died. I will try again the similar motion on the current LLG meeting, but it is likely to be ignored again guessing from their behavior to my past motions. I may try the BPFK meeting to discuss your analysis, even though it is also dying.

Ok. Let us know!

ki'e sai la sykyndyr

je'e

***

@all:

Now about submissions to update the CLL... Let's imagine a second we have an unique and active board (say "LLGBPFKCoders", or whatever), and adequate tools. What would be an efficient submission protocol? Here are two drafts:

Roughly rephrased, it would be:

1. Anyone authenticated (= registered somewhere) can create a draft and discuss about existing ones.
2. Once the draft seems okay enough, anyone authenticated can flag it as "okay, let's call the experts to review this".
3. Only "experts" (to be defined, I guess) can "validate" the proposal.
4. Once validated, only tiny tweaks can me made. Then anyone authenticated can submit a "validated" document.
5. The board votes for those submissions.
6. The tech staff integrates approved submissions.

One of my main concerns was to create something both clear & simple on one hand, and structured enough on the other hand. Here the "Reviewed proposal" may be a bit useless. I'm not 100% sure actually. But if this sounds burden to you, then the simplified protocol would be :

That's even simpler, but removes the ability to make tiny changes once validated. What's your opinion?

ki'e ro do

.i la .sykyndyr.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

2017-11-21 17:08 GMT+03:00 <suke...@gmail.com>:

1. Anyone authenticated (= registered somewhere) can create a draft and discuss about existing ones.

You can. Just fork the repo or clone it etc.

 

1. Once the draft seems okay enough, anyone authenticated can flag it as "okay, let's call the experts to review this".
2. Only "experts" (to be defined, I guess) can "validate" the proposal.

Those "experts" are exactly people to blame for the destruction of Lojban. They already did such thing in past alienating other members and preventing new people to learn the language.