Question:
Is it your intention to fork off of Lojban? If so, what do you believe
fracturing the speech community will accomplish? If not, why are you
making no apparent effort to make this any kind of official project?
(I say this as somebody who loves the idea of a better-organized, more
internally consistent gimste and is likely to back any kind of
official proposal to sanely bring about such a thing.)
So, based on past experience: we'd have to wait until the work on that
bit of stuff was done and there was a proposal to vote on, and
probably also until there was a clear enough mandate from the
community for its implementation that even at least a few
mostly-hardliners like And were squarely behind it, and then a'osai it
would get approved with a promptness you may find startling.
On 5/22/2014 4:50 PM, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
You can view the result of this approach in this thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lojban/_juGorRhWtI
We implore you to carefully review the progression of discourse and
consider for
yourself what may be concluded from the positions put forth there. The
outcome
is not much different than what we expected when we submitted the original
message, at least in terms of pushback. The amount of explicit support and
advocacy was incredibly encouraging and reaffirming.
You seem to have rather low standard for "encouraging and reaffirming".
The Lojban community numbers in the several hundreds if not thousands.
Maybe 1000 copies of CLL have been sold. People who bought it expect that the language will not lightly be changed under them.
You and your few others (relative to that 1000) of course do not respect that, which is your choice.
My position requires me to oppose yours, and to consider your efforts schismatic.
-----
For the other query in this thread: perhaps LLG is unnecessary as an organization, but if Lojban is ever to become something other than a word-of-mouth hobby, it needs an business organization in any relevant political entity capable of dealing with laws, and finance, and business matters. LLG is a nonprofit that can accept financial contributions (in the USA) that are tax-deductible. That is why we had the money to publish CLL in the first place. And why we can eventually hope to publish a dictionary and other books, and sell them internationally.
Esperanto and all other significant language projects have one or more organizations in several countries.
Of course maybe you and your friends are happy with Internet-only materials. I'm an old fossil by your standards. And perhaps when I no longer have the capability of participating, others will decide to fold LLG.
lojbab
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This is too long, but when I try to shorten it, it gets longer.
On 5/24/2014 4:16 AM, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
You seem to have rather low standard for "encouraging and reaffirming".
The Lojban community numbers in the several hundreds if not thousands.
Maybe 1000 copies of CLL have been sold. People who bought it
expect that the language will not lightly be changed under them.
You and your few others (relative to that 1000) of course do not
respect that, which is your choice.
This certainly shows disrespect for CLL.
How so?
I haven't slogged through the latest published take on xorlo yet, but have several questions/objections to what I currently take to the official line. I do think that, at heart, it is the right way to go, but it has inherited or accreted a number of doctrines that render it less useful (an absolute notion of individuals for one).
Interesting, given the arduous history of 'lo'. Assuming that 'zo'e' is here used in the sense of "the contextually specified thing", which is a change (restriction) from CLL, this 'lo' no longer does the job that led to the argument for its acceptance, since 'lo broda cu broda' is now a tautology, unless I've missed something crucial. 'lo broda' was meant, in most stages of the argument, including the last (I thought) to cover the semantic range of English "a broda", "the broda", "brodas" and "broda" in the non definite senses. But at least the last of these may include in the referent of 'lo broda' things which are not broda in any sense, but rather, for example, broda bits.
(There was broda all over my bumper after I plowed into a herd of brodas.)
This possibility comes out in the technical definition of 'lo broda' as the salient node in the upward lattice of the field of jest (me) on the set of brodas (in the domain). Of course, this possibility does also rely on there not being any absolute individuals, since me here extends below things which are brodas (individual brodas still have members, they just aren't brodas).
And by definition, NONE of those categorizations is completely valid, because no one has devised a categorization scheme that encompasses both the semantic meaning of x1 and that of all the other places which are in theory equally important to the gismu semantics.
<snip>
Of course, since the language is intended to "go feral" and cease to be under prescriptive control, it can be argued that we already have conceded that time-free sense in incorrect. Or perhaps any apparent rule which does change through usage is therefore not-a-rule. In which case we may never know "the rules of the language" as long as there are Lojban users. (This tension may indicate why many Lojbanists like the idea of the community deciding what the language is through usage, while at the same time want a perpetual BPFK around to codify usage questions prescriptively (which is arguably exactly the opposite of community decision.)
Neither. Easiest is a gismu that you use, and you tend to memorize only the places that you actually use and that you hear others use. 25 years now, and I never made any effort to learn place structures systematically.
For a language user, rather than a designer, why would you choose to memorize a gismu (place structure) that follows a common pattern but which never actually comes up in your conversation, over a useful brivla where the place structure matters?
what makes them a semantic group? Such considerations were meaningful when we were trying to initially figure out place structures, But now, with the language complete, I would try to avoid grouping words semantically (as I said before, usually such "grouping" is really on the x1 of the gismu and not on the gismu itself - otherwise all words with "under conditions" places are equally a "semantic group" as all words with a type of animal in x1. But who would try to memorize all gismu with an "under condition" place?When there is a semantic group of, say, 20 gismu
Sometimes a semantic association might make memorizing a gismu or its place structure a little easier, but which such associations are important is purely individual.
Meanwhile, the very first change you make to the existing gismu list, no
matter how regularizing it may seem inherently makes the language HARDER
to learn because you have potentially invalidated all prior use of thatgismu both as an individual words and as a component in a lujvo.
No.
First of all, lujvo don't change, since they mean what are defined to mean.
Who decides what they are defined to mean? Most lujvo are invented and used ad hoc with no one bothering to define them or their place structures. When their place structures are defined, as likely as not it will be by someone who did not coin the word, and perhaps someone who does not know how it has been used. This has been especially true since a distinction was realized between making place structures according to some system/rules vs more ad hoc methods (which might include basing them on arbitrary semantic groupings as you wish to do for gismu).
In reality, the meaning of lujvo is not and cannot be prescribed.
Tough. Be annoyed.
Secondly, when a speaker always has to skip around a place (e.g. {broda
fi ko'a} for skipping x2) because they never need that place, then that
is an annoyance.
Or perhaps start using the place you've been skipping - you know: allowing the language to structure the way you think about things. The language was after all originally designed to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Which incidentally brings up another matter. To some extent, the place structures were NOT intended to reflect to most useful form for use as a bare gismu, but rather, we were trying to think about how words would be used in combination, and especially in lujvo. And we were also trying to use the place structures as a defining tool. Most people won't use "under conditions" places or "by standards" places in most of their usage. But it is useful to embed in a predicate word referring to a liquid, that the conditions determine whether it will in fact act as a liquid. And whether something is "good" or not depends on the standard (morality? or perhaps benefit), and possibly the person doing the evaluation because goodness itself is subjective. One could claim these places aren't needed because in natlangs, they seldom are mentioned. But Lojban is NOT a natural language, and we don't rely on natural language conventions if possible.
Your "semantic groupings" sound very much like your personal natural language conventions. I rather suspect that a native speaker of a language quite unlike yours would consider different "semantic groupings" more important than yours, and perhaps will find places useful that you prefer to skip, because in their native language, different assumptions about the world have shaped the meaning of words.
You
have made someone who knew that gismu less knowledgeable (and whether
you have experienced it or not, the relearning of language changes is
among the more difficult parts of learning a new language.
They need to relearn the gismu, yes,
Why should they? And in particular, what gives a newbie like you the right to tell them that they should?
Only according to your specific, natural-language-biased assumptions.but it will be a simpler definition.
We've had the debate before, countless times, over place structure minimalization, maximalization, strongly regularized, etc. in cluding several times before the gismu list was baselined. Different speakers were involved, and results were, umm, inconsistent, as you can see by the fact that you find the current set inconsistent.
It is pure hubris on your part to think that you, and your group of fellow travellers are more insightful than the people who came before you.
in *your* opinion consistent, and in *your* opinion easy to learn. Of course you have no actual basis for that opinion, only some untested assumptions about what sorts of things make learning easier, and place structures more consistent.Also, if we also take future Lojban speakers into account,
it's more desirable (in my opinion) to hand them a consistent and
easy-to-learn gimste,
Of course they will. You think you will be the last person to come along and argue for a new improved gismu list? This comes up every few years. And if we ever said "yes" to a single one, we surrender all moral authority to oppose the next dozen attempts.
and they *won't* have to relearn anything.
This one I also learned a long time ago, luckily schooled by other Lojbanists. The original set of rafsi assignments was based on word frequencies and usage of gismu in proposed lujvo up through 1991. I did a nice systematic study and assigned rafsi to give the shortest and best words based on the then-current list.
In 1994 after much more usage, I did the same analysis, finding that a couple hundred rafsi should be reassigned. But the list was baselined, so I put it to a BPFK like committee. They rejected most of my proposals, and I am glad they did. Try reading any pre-1994 Lojban, and you'll find it rather hard, simply because a few percent of the rafsi changed.
Now envision your future Lojban student trying to read any of the megabytes of Lojban text in the current corpus. You want to throw out 25 years of usage history by hundreds instead of just 5 years of history by a couple dozen.
The practical impact is that the resistance to revising the gismu list every time some new reformer like you comes along goes away. And old Lojban text in invalidated to some unknown extent. And the result isn't really any better than the old list because people shouldn't be wasting their time memorizing all of the gismu place structures
What the gismu are about remains
the same, and some details which most people never even got familiar
with are adjusted. The practical impact is much less drastic than you
make it sound.
(there is somewhat more limited benefit to knowing all gismu at the keyword level, and most or all of the rafsi, because it tells you how the wordspace is filled and how rafsi-space is filled and thus makes it easier to decode a new lujvo that you don't know the meaning of. If you know the rafsi for sralo, you won't accidentally interpret that rafsi as meaning something else, and since rafsi space is so crowded, knowing some of the rafsi makes it enormously easier to learn the rest, merely by elimination.
No such factor motivates place structure memorization. You learn them by using them, as you need them.
The simpler and the more consistent the gimste, the higher are the
chances for the average person to learn Lojban and the more pleasant it
is to be a user of this language, I believe.
Those claims are merely that: claims. Unsupported by actual evidence.
Experience, both my own and those of other jbopre I interact with. We
use the language daily,
Whoopie. Anecdotal evidence based on personal experience. Let me know when a linguistics journal accepts your paper based on that "experience".
And why should your personal aesthetics preferences count more than mine?
and making slight adjustments in gismu place
structures results in a big increase in pleasantness of use. This may
not be the case for you, but it is for some.
And it is important that this be so, because too much semantic emphasis
on the x1 risks losing the predicate nature of the language.
But they are not limited to x1. And they couldn't be, since Lojban
sometimes puts the experiencer in x2 and someimes in x1. We are able to
look past x1 and figure out what a gismu is about.
Sometimes. And sometimes the semantic experiencer is in x3 or x4 or x5. And probably in some lujvo, in x8.
And it is just as fundamental to understanding Lojban conceptually that a beginner be able to cope with an experiencer in x8 as in x1 or x2. (Of course a beginner is far less likely to run into such a word these days.)
That way it becomes much easier to get related gismu to align.
All gismu are "related".
Why should some "align", and not others
For example, all the gismu about emotional states could go together.
They could. But what about the words that you don't recognize to be
about emotional states
I think we can agree that {klama} is not an emotion, whereas {badri} is.
klacni (or maybe klaselcni) would probably be an emotion (the emotional reaction to going somewhere, which reaction might be dependent on the route and means). It might or might not have a place structure similar to badri. cricni is even more recognizably an emotion (English gloss "loss") and even more likely to have a different place structure. But we aren't going to try to systematize all lujvo that are used to talk about emotions, so why do so for gismu.
Gismu are NOT semantically privileged in Lojban. They are morphologically privileged in having rafsi, but not in any other way. And most people learn a lot of gismu relative to lujvo when first starting, but that is likely an artifact of how the language was designed. I rather suspect that Robin's kids recognize or attach significance to gismu vs lujvo, and you probably shouldn't either, but no one has written textbooks that reflect this fundamental truth.
As part of the revision, I would also like to define each gismu well
enough that we can come up with examples filling *every* sumti place of
every gismu.
That would be an interesting but probably unproductive challenge.
Then you aren't aware of one of the most common requests by beginners I
hear. They want examples, they want to know how to use a gismu. (to
which you will reply again "it's used how people want to use it")
I am quite aware of the requests of beginners. I have after all been teaching the language longer than anyone else. And, I don't reply that way. If someone is a beginner, I wouldn't be trying to explain the language using gismu that you don't know how to use. Beginners aren't going to be able to use the whole language with facility.
But even ignoring that, if some people want a strongly prescribed language and others do not, we have a fundamentally intractable contradiction, and cannot please everyone. So we follow the concepts under which the project was started and under which it has survived 25 years
If prescriptivists want to prescribe up a storm, they can try, but not as part of LLG, and we would prefer that they not try to pretend that they are working on Lojban. (Again, we have no way to stop someone from doing so, but we certainly won't offer help or encouragement.)
I can't please your ilk, and I'm not inclined to try, even if I didn't have that LLG members' motion directing me not to do so.
You got yourself onto the TLI Academy (JCB's likely turning over in his grave about that) - they accept the possibility of prescribing everything. Good luck over there.
*You* aren't the "community of users", and you and your friends are only a tiny subset of that community, if what you are using still fits the label "Lojban". Lojban has stayed alive for many years before you came along, and will stay alive just fine without you, and might even do better, since more people will understand that we aren't going to support or even cooperate with every splinter group that announces itself.
Afterall, who, if not the community of users, keeps Lojban alive?
I didn't get involved the last time, but why do you think I care enough about your opinion to bother?
lojbab
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On 5/25/2014 2:06 PM, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
25 years now, and I never made any effort to learn place
structures systematically.
This is a thoughtless retort.
It is a truthful one.
There may be such a thing, but you have no more access to it than I do. And I have more interesting things to worry about.
The suggestion that there is truly no objective sense of efficiency, rhyme or reason to a place structure is
unmoving.
The idea that I give a damn about either, also doesn't follow.The idea that an efficient place structure has anything to do
with memorizing gismu systematically doesn't follow.
For a language user, rather than a designer, why would you choose to
memorize a gismu (place structure) that follows a common pattern but
which never actually comes up in your conversation, over a useful
brivla where the place structure matters?
Another retort that doesn't connect with the original statement. In factthis retort makes zero sense whatsoever. Why would anyone pick a gismu
that follows a common pattern but never comes up in your conversation?
Back in the day, I picked some 1300 gismu that had never come up in my conversation, because no one at that time spoke Lojban. A large chunk of those words were gismu in TLI Loglan, and their initial place structures were more or less the same that JCB used, except where we had a good reason to change. But JCB's gismu and place structure choice were often quite arbitrary, too.
Efficiency was never a priority.
You expect me to spend more time thinking about this stuff than I already have?
This is just not a thought-out reply.
You are right.
You're not even trying.
I suggest no such thing. There are lots of ways, but how meaningful they are is a subjective question.
To suggest that there is no meaningful way to semantically categorize the gismu
Ridicule?
for the utility of helping us
partition the work, one has to wonder what your actual intention in this
reply is.
Most of the Lojbanic world isn't involved in your process and won't be.Furthermore, the process is democratic
Most people have no interest in such a discussion.
and so those associations are completely open to discussion.
At this point, either the person who uses one, or the person who enters it into jbovlaste or some other word collection.No.
First of all, lujvo don't change, since they mean what are
defined to mean.
Who decides what they are defined to mean?
In reality, the meaning of lujvo is not and cannot be prescribed.
In reality. Sure, if you say so. Except that we have a dictionary
I have never seen a published Lojban dictionary. If you refer to jbovlaste, it isn't a dictionary, but rather a data base, and I don't believe its collection has any official status.
I have never been aware of, nor involved in, any such vote. I suspect that this is true for most of the community.
where
explicit lujvo place structures are created mindfully and voted on
democratically.
Or perhaps start using the place you've been skipping - you know:
allowing the language to structure the way you think about things.
The language was after all originally designed to test the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
This actually made me chuckle out loud. You're not even trying to create
strong replies
Correct. selpa'i is hardly worth such an effort, even if I had the time.
Maybe we don't speak the same language.
that aim at the content to which you are replying. Use
places that are not relevant to the speech, just because they come
earlier in the place structure? What are you even *talking about* Bob?
Your "semantic groupings" sound very much like your personal natural
language conventions. I rather suspect that a native speaker of a
language quite unlike yours would consider different "semantic
groupings" more important than yours, and perhaps will find places
useful that you prefer to skip, because in their native language,
different assumptions about the world have shaped the meaning of words.
Bob, we're not making natlang arguments
Then you aren't talking about language. Lojban will never be recognized by real linguists as being a real language, if it doesn't have certain traits that they define as necessary.
Maybe you don't care. Your choice.
.u'inai .ionai
Hubris on our part is one way to look at it. I'll say that hearing this
critique from someone who has throughout this entire dialog minimized
and insulted something he cannot even really perceive, being so far
removed from the life of the daily lojbanist and who cannot even speak a
dialect of lojban understandable by anyone having learned the language
in the last 5 years is certainly not going to evoke the any feeling of
legitimate and genuine criticism in us.
You may know, but the rest of us don't.
What an interesting demonstration is all that one can really think, as
we know who we are,
Evidence is lacking.
To see you attempt this coloring while all the while
knowing that the very audience you speak to is mostly supportive
in *your* opinion consistent, and in *your* opinion easy to learn.
Of course you have no actual basis for that opinion, only some
untested assumptions about what sorts of things make learning
easier, and place structures more consistent.
This is where you truly show that you have no idea what's going on
beneath you. You believe that we are simply tinkerers
Yes. You talk like all the tinkerers before you.
You are you. You are not the IRC community. You speak only for yourself.
But the truth is, the IRC community
Yet no one is ever there most of the times I log in.
is one of the most active communities Lojban has
(I'm not saying that no one uses IRC; I see a long list of bots logged in, but people don't respond to what I say, so I don't bother very often.selpa'i also is not "the IRC community" and does not have any authority to speak for them.
No one buys the "selpa'i and his rag tag IRC community is just a small
ignorant rebel group looking to destroy the language argument. Ask some
of the people around you.
and they *won't* have to relearn anything.
Of course they will. You think you will be the last person to come
along and argue for a new improved gismu list? This comes up every
few years. And if we ever said "yes" to a single one, we surrender
all moral authority to oppose the next dozen attempts.
We're not coming up with anything.
Good. Then no one has to bother with you.
and making slight adjustments in gismu place
structures results in a big increase in pleasantness of use.
This may
not be the case for you, but it is for some.
And why should your personal aesthetics preferences count more than
mine?
The process is open for anyone to make arguments for or against the
proposed changes of others or their own.
There is no process.
We haven't managed the much smaller goal of a set of examples for every cmavo. Why worry about a larger and less important goal?That you are disagreeing with the goal of
having examples justifying the design of every place in the gimste is
unproductive
I don't see any need to "justify the design of every place in the gimste". I can freely admit that many decisions were arbitrary, and further I assert that any "justification" is arbitrary. It simply doesn't matter, because gismu are not semantically privileged above lujvo, I rather doubt that you expect to justify every place of every lujvo.
But even ignoring that, if some people want a strongly prescribed
language and others do not, we have a fundamentally intractable
contradiction, and cannot please everyone. So we follow the
concepts under which the project was started and under which it hassurvived 25 years
Lojban as language used by actual people, is inevitably a language that
changes naturally adapting to the needs of the users as those needs
arise and inspiration provides workable solutions. The idea that lojban
can ever be truly prescribed can in no way ever be enforced or otherwise
implemented.
Sounds like what I argued in response to Robin in the discussion cited by selpa'i.
I guess you don't really agree with selpa'i
Then it is really a *description*, not a prescription. People can use descriptions prescriptively, but that doesn't make them prescriptions.Any prescription is only useful as a reflection of usage.
Your support is not in evidence.In the context of actually having some LLG support this is ironic.
I fully respect people who use the language on IRC, for doing so. But they are still not above other Lojbanists who never have done so.
Lojban, as what people say when they say they are doing Lojban, will change constantly and in uncontrolled ways. Lojban, as the language that has official imprimatur (however that may be gained, right now from BPFK, apparently), will also change but more slowly and in more controlled ways. That it will change (or die, of course) is a result of its being a language. That its official form will change slowly and in a controlled way is a result of the kind of language it is: constructed and logical, especially the latter.
“Logical” here has two interrelated parts. The first of these is that Lojban is to be syntactically unambiguous, every grammatical utterance has a unique parse which tells how the sentence is to be interpreted. The second is that this is to be achieved by taking the languages syntax from that of First Order Predicate Logic (actually some higher order intensional logic, a la Montague, but that does not make a difference to the basic point here).
Now, someone who knows FOPL would be hard pressed to find it in Lojban; many things have had to be changed to make a usable language (every other expression in FOPL is a parenthesis of some sort, for example, or some equally non-content expression). These impose restrictions on how the official language can change, since the connection with FOPL cannot be broken for fear of losing unambiguity (or, at least, a relatively easy way to claim it, although this connection is not really exploited), and, even if the connection is lost, unambiguity must be maintained.
So, any change has to be checked to see that it does not affect this prime quality (basically, Lojban's only special feature – it and Loglan are hardly the only languages with socket-and-plugs core syntax). So there is always going to be a prescriptive element in Lojban.
That being said, it must also be said that most changes in vocabulary have nothing to do with this central ground.
Changing the meaning of one of the holes in a socket does not affect the heart of the language.
Whether or not these changes are officialized or not just doesn't matter to Lojban.
Of course, such a change may affect the Lojban community, dividing it into two groups who misunderstand one another in some particular circumstances.
For the development of the language, this can have serious consequences, cutting one group off from the accumulated lore of the past and the other group off from new material as it comes in, breaking continuity. It tends moreover to tick off more experienced speakers, who have learned the older form and are now asked to relearn (which is very hard – I still, nearly 40 later, am most likely to come up with a Loglan word as my first attempt).
And, alas, all this tends to create internal tensions, which can tear a constructed-language community apart, resulting, typically, in, first, two much smaller groups in competition, then one still rather small group, then nothing in that line at all.
But this doesn't have to happen,
especially if, as here, the changes are made in remote (so, by assumption, less used) holes: it would be a long time before the two sides noticed that one side had dropped x5 of {klama}, say.
While rational language teaching material is still not as available as would be nice,
most of what is available teaches vocabulary in context, stressing the useful part and introducing both sockets and their holes as needed.) Of course, that raises the issue of why bother to change these holes and the answer seems to be that the changes are to satisfy some extrinsic goal: symmetry or “orderliness” or “ease of learning” (which, in context, suggest that learning predicates is done by mini-pumping, learning all the motion words at once, say – a possible but rarely ideal approach).
So not central issues at all.
Further, we have all the usual tools of language for dealing with dialects and diachronic change. We recognize the differences and translate and, if we don't, we ask for an explanation when the discussion obviously runs off the rails. Thus, vocabulary changes are just not important.
Well, a few are and these are all among cmavo.
Obviously, if you change the meaning of {a} you have changed the connection to FOPL, and similarly with other expressions clearly tied to logic. But this tends to expand outward. If you change definition {ai} to or from factive (I don't remember where it is right now; it has changed at least five times in 60 years), you change the whole logical structure of the utterance of which it is a part, and many expressions have this feature. The possibilities for misunderstanding are now at a more profound level, even if, technically, the same cures are available. So, for these kinds of changes, control is again needed.
And, correspondingly, we need to know where we are now, as – for various reason – apparently we do not.
So, if you accept that the cmavo are not completed, that is the priority task and any activity that might be directed to that task but goes to something else is a waste or even an attack on Lojban.
Since meddling with gismu is a task very similar to organizing the cmavo, it will appear to Lojbab et al as such a waste (or, given the tone of the proclamation of undertaking that task, an attack).
On the other hand, since the people doing the meddling are pretty clearly not going to work on cmavo (and are not obviously competent to do so anyhow)
the tone of his response seems inappropriate (except as a response to their tone). The best thing is just to ignore them, pretty much. The one reason to pay attention them is the potential they have to sow dissensions, but, for that, the appropriate response is just not to allow them to use the LLG websites.
On Sunday, May 25, 2014 at 8:14 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban wrote:
In the midst off this often depressingly puerile exchange, I found the call for a philosopher of language, so I volunteer (MA in Linguistics, PhD in Philosophy, dissertation on the borderline between logic and language, etc. etc. including teaching course in the area for forty three years, somewhere between 54 and 38 years in the logical language business, including all the available offices at TLI and editor of The Lojbanist and VP and Board member at LLG).
So, a curse on both your houses!
Lojban, as what people say when they say they are doing Lojban, will change constantly and in uncontrolled ways. Lojban, as the language that has official imprimatur (however that may be gained, right now from BPFK, apparently), will also change but more slowly and in more controlled ways. That it will change (or die, of course) is a result of its being a language. That its official form will change slowly and in a controlled way is a result of the kind of language it is: constructed and logical, especially the latter.
“Logical” here has two interrelated parts. The first of these is that Lojban is to be syntactically unambiguous, every grammatical utterance has a unique parse which tells how the sentence is to be interpreted. The second is that this is to be achieved by taking the languages syntax from that of First Order Predicate Logic (actually some higher order intensional logic, a la Montague, but that does not make a difference to the basic point here). Now, someone who knows FOPL would be hard pressed to find it in Lojban; many things have had to be changed to make a usable language (every other expression in FOPL is a parenthesis of some sort, for example, or some equally non-content expression). These impose restrictions on how the official language can change, since the connection with FOPL cannot be broken for fear of losing unambiguity (or, at least, a relatively easy way to claim it, although this connection is not really exploited), and, even if the connection is lost, unambiguity must be maintained. So, any change has to be checked to see that it does not affect this prime quality (basically, Lojban's only special feature – it and Loglan are hardly the only languages with socket-and-plugs core syntax). So there is always going to be a prescriptive element in Lojban.
That being said, it must also be said that most changes in vocabulary have nothing to do with this central ground. Changing the meaning of one of the holes in a socket does not affect the heart of the language.
Whether or not these changes are officialized or not just doesn't matter to Lojban. Of course, such a change may affect the Lojban community,
dividing it into two groups who misunderstand one another in some particular circumstances. For the development of the language, this can have serious consequences, cutting one group off from the accumulated lore of the past and the other group off from new material as it comes in, breaking continuity. It tends moreover to tick off more experienced speakers, who have learned the older form and are now asked to relearn (which is very hard – I still, nearly 40 later, am most likely to come up with a Loglan word as my first attempt). And, alas, all this tends to create internal tensions, which can tear a constructed-language community apart, resulting, typically, in, first, two much smaller groups in competition, then one still rather small group, then nothing in that line at all.
But this doesn't have to happen, especially if, as here, the changes are made in remote (so, by assumption, less used) holes: it would be a long time before the two sides noticed that one side had dropped x5 of {klama}, say. (The need to know all the holes of all the sockets goes back to JCB's medieval notions of language learning and to the devices which were designed to enable “predicate pumping”. It once was the case that at least initial claims to competence amounted to a total of the number of sockets you could recognize and give all the hole-meanings for – and, eventually, all the derivational forms. While rational language teaching material is still not as available as would be nice, most of what is available teaches vocabulary in context, stressing the useful part and introducing both sockets and their holes as needed.) Of course, that raises the issue of why bother to change these holes and the answer seems to be that the changes are to satisfy some extrinsic goal: symmetry or “orderliness” or “ease of learning” (which, in context, suggest that learning predicates is done by mini-pumping, learning all the motion words at once, say – a possible but rarely ideal approach). So not central issues at all. Further, we have all the usual tools of language for dealing with dialects and diachronic change. We recognize the differences and translate and, if we don't, we ask for an explanation when the discussion obviously runs off the rails. Thus, vocabulary changes are just not important.
Well, a few are and these are all among cmavo. Obviously, if you change the meaning of {a} you have changed the connection to FOPL, and similarly with other expressions clearly tied to logic. But this tends to expand outward. If you change definition {ai} to or from factive (I don't remember where it is right now; it has changed at least five times in 60 years), you change the whole logical structure of the utterance of which it is a part, and many expressions have this feature. The possibilities for misunderstanding are now at a more profound level, even if, technically, the same cures are available. So, for these kinds of changes, control is again needed. And, correspondingly, we need to know where we are now, as – for various reason – apparently we do not. The definitions of content expressions may not be perfect, but they serve (as the fact that they have served and are serving shows) and so “fixing” them is a low priority. But, if, as is claimed, the definitions of some non-content expressions is no complete or not set, this is a structural matter that needs to be fixed if we are to say the language is complete (let alone finished).
So, if you accept that the cmavo are not completed, that is the priority task and any activity that might be directed to that task but goes to something else is a waste or even an attack on Lojban.
Since meddling with gismu is a task very similar to organizing the cmavo, it will appear to Lojbab et al as such a waste (or, given the tone of the proclamation of undertaking that task, an attack). On the other hand, since the people doing the meddling are pretty clearly not going to work on cmavo
(and are not obviously competent to do so anyhow),
the tone of his response seems inappropriate (except as a response to their tone).
The best thing is just to ignore them, pretty much.
The one reason to pay attention them is the potential they have to sow dissensions,
but, for that, the appropriate response is just not to allow them to use the LLG websites.
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ni'o .a'o ma'a ba zi co'a gunka tu'a lo gimste .i .i lo kampu se stidi cu pa moi .e'u .i xu su'o da poi kampu srana zo'u: do no'u la .xorxes. cu djica lo nu ma'a da cnegau .i mi na tugni fi lo du'u lo nu da tcini (to sa'e tcini ja vanbi toi) te sumti lo simsa be zo litki cu sarcu .i pe'i zo va'o banzu .i si'a mi jinvi lo du'u ka'e vimcu vei so'e .a ro lo marji te sumti .i zo marji zasti .i lo nu cusku lu ti baktu lo djacu gi'e marji lo slasi li'u noi basti lu ti baktu lo djacu lo slasi li'u noi cizra (to be mi toi) milxe cu cumki gi'e la'a sai banzu .i do'a nai ju'o nandymau fa lo ka mo'icli .i ji'a sa'u ro da zo'u lo du'u lo baktu da marji cu nibli lo du'u baktu fi zi'o .i ja'o lo si'o marji na vajni
ni'o .a'o su'o drata ba zi stidi de .i lo nu darlu lo na'e srana cu xamgu ma'a no da (to mi zo'u pe'i lo ci moi te sumti be zo xamgu cu panra lo re moi pe zo drani ge'u .a lo ci moi pe zo mapti toi) .u'i
ni'o ja'o su'o ci mei fa lo na'e se nelci klesi .i .a'u ma poi drata cu fanza .i lo jutsi te sumti cu na'e sarcu gi'e ku'i simlu lo ka vajni fi lo lojbo citri .i ku'i simsa lo marji te sumti lo ka ro roi ka'e cusku lu ti mlatu gi'e jutlei la .siiam. li'u .i na birti
Usage and definitions are drifting further and further apart,
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You are right that one can imagine a dialect with not more than two slots.The advantage is that there are fewer slots to remember.The drawback is that there are more words to remember.You can create such a dialect within Lojban and it won't break Lojban. You are even free to add words for it to jbvovlaste.lojban.org.Whether they become popular is another question (you would probably have to write texts in Lojban so that others read them and absorb your new words).The same applies to three-slot predicates.
litru already has that place, you don't have to add it.
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litru already has that place, you don't have to add it.
> They choose to use Lojban because it is DONE (even if not
> fully documented). And they value our commitment against ad hoc
> prescriptive change.
Oh yeah, this is true for me.
Yeah, it may sound crazy to some, but there are some people (like me)
out there who actually simply want to USE Lojban, not to change it all
the time. xD
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ni'o mi nau cusku lo se jinvi be mi po'o .iku'i mi ja'a cilre fo lo selsku ne'i lo dei mroxirma si mrilinsi ku (noi sarji ro lo re seldau).i mi tugni do so'o da .iku'i mi jinvi sai lo du'u sapselga'e fa lo du'u mu'i makau lo za'e "balningaugirzu" cu te smuni le banstika pruce poi zasti ku'o lo tolbanzu (to sei cumki lo za'i tolbanzu cu tolsnuti toi .u'i)ni'o fau lo renopavomoi nanca ke lojbangirzu nunpenmi ku lo bi'unai catni ritli pruce co'a masno .akti .i za'a so'o da djica co cmibi'o lylygy. .iku'inai ma'a ba facki lo du'u xukau lo nu xagyfarvi cu cumki
Bob has just called the AGM and ensured that new blood will be able to join LLG and get things moving again. I don't see any signs of proprietoriality on his part, just the sort of investedness that many others have too.
And.
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On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 at 2:12 PM, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
It was one week ago you said it had been called one week ago. I think you're stuck in a time dilation. It was called Nov 3rd for everyone keeping track at home.
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Sorry, I've been really busy and haven't been keeping abreast of things. AGM? What is that, how do I get myself informed of happenings with it, etc.?
On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Jonathan Jones wrote:
Sorry, I've been really busy and haven't been keeping abreast of things. AGM? What is that, how do I get myself informed of happenings with it, etc.?
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Section 4. Annual Meeting. The annual meeting of the members shall nominally be held at such place and time as the Directors shall designate. The Secretary/Treasurer shall serve personally, or by personal telephone conversation,[3] or send through the post office or by electronic mail[3] addressed to each member at his last known address, at least fifteen (15)[1] days before such meeting a notice thereof.
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I don't really want to be a part of it, I've been busy with personal and work things for so long I doubt I'd be able to usefully contribute. I was just wanting to know how we would be informed of the results.
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