[lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.
Robin Lee Powell
OK, been promising it for a while; here it is.
http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
There are all *sorts* of finicky details we could discuss, but right
now I and others would very much just like to get a sense of where
the community stands on these sorts of issues, so, if we could
*please* keep the discussion for now (1) on the main list and (2)
agree/disagree answer to the following question, after you've read
(as much as you wish to) of the essay:
I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
Agree or disagree?
Thanks.
-Robin
--
They say: "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm thinking: "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other than the default outcome?" See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/
--
The mail came from the "Lojban Announcements" Google Group. You are probably not subscribed to that group directly. All mails to this group are forwarded to all major Lojban groups. See http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojbanic+Forums for details about what this list is for, including how to contact the management.
To unsubscribe, reply using "remove me" as the subject.
Matt Arnold
I agree with your essay in its entirety. Thank you so much for it.
-Eppcott
Minimiscience
skamyxatra.
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
{to'e tugni}. If backwards compatibility is necessary or desired, the "version
numbering" idea should work out fine.
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
le do cizra notci cu kairgau mi lo nalselcme kamte'a
Oren
I agree with your essay in its entirety. Thank you so much for it.
-Eppcott"
.i mi cu tugni la'oi Eppcott .i ni'o co'o mi'e korbi
Christopher Doty
intended to be "logical," then I am hard-pressed to understand how, if
improvement is apparent, one would disagree with said improvement. It
seems a more basic question, one to ask before this one, would be "Do
you believe that Lojban could be improved if any number of changes
were implemented?" And perhaps, also, "Would the benefits of these
improvements outweigh the the possible issues (relearning,
back-compatibility, etc.)?"
Having said that, though, I think that the general sentiment of the
essay is sound: Lojban should, absolutely, be controlled by a central
authority. Letting the language grow on it's own means that it will,
if widely picked up, fracture into a bunch of dialects--consider the
issue of naming languages which is currently being discussed on the
list. Although it might seem minor to some, it is pretty essential to
have clear names for all of the languages from my point of view. If
Lojban is ever to be adopted internationally as a means of
communication, how exactly would that work if people are making up
words on an ad hoc basis, as was suggested earlier?
Consider an example: because Lojban provides clear predicate places
for gismu, I think it would be great to use in glossing basic terms
from a bunch of languages for cross-comparison and, by extension, as a
medium for publishing scholarship about languages--except that, if
everyone is making up names of languages as they go along, how the
hell am I supposed to find papers on the languages I am interested in?
As in currently stands, there are a bunch of languages that have
multiple names, usually with some older and some newer. It is really
terrible to have to do multiple searches and weed out duplicates. What
if everyone was just made up names for the elements?? What would that
look like??
Chris
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
>
>
Christopher Doty
intended to be "logical," then I am hard-pressed to understand how, if
improvement is apparent, one would disagree with said improvement. It
seems a more basic question, one to ask before this one, would be "Do
you believe that Lojban could be improved if any number of changes
were implemented?" And perhaps, also, "Would the benefits of these
back-compatibility, etc.)?"
Having said that, though, I think that the general sentiment of the
essay is sound: Lojban should, absolutely, be controlled by a central
authority. Letting the language grow on it's own means that it will,
if widely picked up, fracture into a bunch of dialects--consider the
issue of naming languages which is currently being discussed on the
list. Although it might seem minor to some, it is pretty essential to
have clear names for all of the languages from my point of view. If
Lojban is ever to be adopted internationally as a means of
communication, how exactly would that work if people are making up
words on an ad hoc basis, as was suggested earlier?
Consider an example: because Lojban provides clear predicate places
for gismu, I think it would be great to use in glossing basic terms
from a bunch of languages for cross-comparison and, by extension, as a
medium for publishing scholarship about languages--except that, if
everyone is making up names of languages as they go along, how the
hell am I supposed to find papers on the languages I am interested in?
As in currently stands, there are a bunch of languages that have
multiple names, usually with some older and some newer, and I can tell
you that is is very annoying to have to do multiple searches to find
these things. Why are we expecting that people will just pick up
certain words? What about anything written before people start to
settle on a given term??
I will also say that, as a linguist, I am going to nitpicking about a
couple of things since this issue has come up--I think there is
various room for linguistic improvement, as it's pretty clear that
there wasn't a ton of linguistic involvement in the creation of the
language. Although most everything is sound, there are a couple things
that just don't/won't work, and I think it is worth considering them.
Gismu with more than four places is the example that jumps immediately
to mind, but there are other minor things that will, linguistically,
interfere with Lojban being adopted internationally.......
Luke Bergen
Disagree, I guess. Everything in the essay made sense to me, so <that>.Your question doesn't seem to me like it's asking if we like "option 1" or "option 2" from your essay. Could you clarify? (I like option 2).
On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lojban Beginners" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban-b...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban-beginne...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban-beginners?hl=en.
Philip Newton
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
Disagree.
And I found the essays's argument that "nobody really wants to let
usage decide" extremely compelling; I would also much rather have a
formalised definition, compiled by people with some experience (though
influenced by past usage).
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <philip...@gmail.com>
GFBer...@gmail.com
> rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> > I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> > current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> > Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
> >
> > Agree or disagree?
>
Disagree.
-Geoff
Bob LeChevalier
> <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
>>FOLLOWUPS TO: The main list.
>>
>>OK, been promising it for a while; here it is.
>>
>>http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
>>
>>There are all *sorts* of finicky details we could discuss, but right
>>now I and others would very much just like to get a sense of where
>>the community stands on these sorts of issues, so, if we could
>>*please* keep the discussion for now (1) on the main list and (2)
>>agree/disagree answer to the following question, after you've read
>>(as much as you wish to) of the essay:
>>
>> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
>> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
>> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>>
>>Agree or disagree?
Both, depending on timeframe and definitions of terms.
Lojban needs to remain stable and resistant to change, especially in the
near term. When numbers of Lojbanists and formal documentation are both
strong enough, then "improvements" will generally be made by usage, not
by fiat, with skilled Lojbanists being the only ones having the
capability to demonstrate and explain their variant usages in-language,
and other skilled Lojbanists voting-with-their-usage to adopt the variation.
That is what the phrase "let usage decide" was supposed to refer to -
the asymptotic reduction of change-by-fiat to nil, in favor of natural
evolution through usage. Shakespeare introduced considerable new
vocabulary and usage to the English language, and needed no byfy to
approve his efforts.
Thus in the near term, I agree. In the longer term, I disagree, but
require that "improvements" are introduced through usage, and
explanation in-language when necessary, and not by fiat.
Of course, by "current state", I mean the language that the byfy is
attempting to document, and not the state of half-documented-ness that
persists.
lojbab
tijlan
wrote:
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
Disagree.
Robin Lee Powell
This is from And Rosta, in response to both my essay and in
particular me showing him the email I quote at the top:
Thanks -- for drawing my attention to your very interesting essay
& for drawing my attention to my old message. I guess that if the
views expressed in your essay had held sway back when I was
involved with Lojban, I would have stayed involved (at least when
the demands of Real Life allowed). When it comes to matters of
linguistic analysis and insight and the like, Xorxes's is the
smartest mind I've encountered outside the world of professional
linguistics. He also has extraordinary patience and perseverance
and good humour.
My thinking was/is:
A. Your #1 and #2 goals were paramount: the language should be
capable of expressing desired meanings unambiguously, and without
so much effort that the cost of the effort outweighs the benefit
of the clarity of expression. B. It would be a real benefit for
the world for this language to exist and seriously be usable for
real-world stuff (such as legislative language). C. To create the
language you'd need a team -- too much work for one person, and
the job would need many eyes. D. With the benefit of hindsight,
and learning from the Lojban experience, the best way to achieve
(A) would be to start from scratch. (Lojban grammar is needlessly
complicated, and the design of its grammar and of its morphology
makes it impossible to get it down to an acceptable level of
conciseness.)
(B) & (C) were in conflict with (D). So I both worked for Lojban
and thought about how to best to do (A). Eventually it became
clear to me not only that (A) was not going to happen to Lojban
but also that the very attempt to turn Lojban into an (A)-type
language was upsetting people with just as much of a stake and
investment in Lojban as I had. So I withdrew, and straightaway my
levels of free time rose and my levels of stress fell (tho Life
soon reversed those changes!).
It would be great news if at long last Lojban could officially
follow your manifesto, which in practice would amount to
incorporating the changes Xorxes would make to it. That would at
least make Lojban as good as it could ever be.
Keep me posted on developments -- I'm still interested in it all,
even though I have much less time than I once upon a time did.
Robin Lee Powell
Then we are on opposite sides, I'm afraid; I now think this is a
terrible plan, and I do not want to be a part of it.
(and, for the record, this is exactly what i understood "let usage
decide" to mean)
treed
wrote:
>
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
Robin already knows where I stand on this, but I figured I'd mention
it here for everyone else:
I disagree with that statement, and wholeheartedly support Robin's
essay.
-- bancus
Matt Arnold
I have been drifting out of the community for the past couple of years
through discouragement. I used to have such grand dreams for the
project, but most of those plans turned out to be dependent on the
BPFK finishing Lojban.
I thought work was proceeding apace, behind the scenes, and that the
only problem was generating enough work. It now turns out to have been
actively held back by a dispute between description of usage, and
prescription through centralized planning. In a community this size,
usage is a statistically insignificant sample. We have no known means
to measure or prove anything about usage. It is also a
self-contradicting authority. Usage in the wild has no mechanism with
which to resolve disputes with other usage. No wonder we were in a
permanent bottleneck.
We let talented people go to waste for nearly a decade. This has been
a disaster. I do not accept it.
The "let usage decide" policy was put in place to prevent a recurrance
of the James Cooke Brown failure mode-- a failure mode which is no
longer possible in the current environment. We need a policy that
mitigates the failure mode we're seeing, not the one that threatened
us decades ago. Now our failure mode is lack of decisiveness. It is
the responsibility of centralized authority to break the impasse that
happens when you let usage *totally* decide, rather than influence.
Robin's plan is now well underway and it will succeed. I have
confidence that the tide is overwhelmingly on our side. That will
prevent me going away. But I will not remain in a project that is
committed to an indefinite holding pattern.
-Eppcott
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "lojban" group.
> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> FOLLOWUPS TO: The main list.
>
> OK, been promising it for a while; here it is.
>
> http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
>
> There are all *sorts* of finicky details we could discuss, but right
> now I and others would very much just like to get a sense of where
> the community stands on these sorts of issues, so, if we could
> *please* keep the discussion for now (1) on the main list and (2)
> agree/disagree answer to the following question, after you've read
> (as much as you wish to) of the essay:
>
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
I agree with the essence of the essay (finicky details aside) and
disagree with the statement.
mi'e xorxes
Alan Post
And, "disagree," by way of answering the assertion Robin posed to
Lojban announce:
I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
I disagree because I think that Lojban remaining as close as it
possibly can to its current state will eventually render it obsolete
by a language that doesn't adhere to that policy.
-Alan
--
te djuno lo do sevzi
Robin Lee Powell
> in the near term. When numbers of Lojbanists and formal
> documentation are both strong enough, then "improvements" will
> generally be made by usage, not by fiat, with skilled Lojbanists
> being the only ones having the capability to demonstrate and
> explain their variant usages in-language, and other skilled
> Lojbanists voting-with-their-usage to adopt the variation.
The problem is this will never, ever happen. Knowing Lojbanists as
I do, what would actually happen is we'd argue about things and then
decide what to adopt explicitely, and *then* go out and use it.
This is very much not anything like real language drift, which is
what you seem to have in mind.
Timo Paulssen
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
>
I, too, hope for Lojban to become awesome. I am very fine with changes
like xorlo and the dotside, that cause small bits of relearning, but
have tremendously good effects.
I agree with most of the essay. I don't say "all", because I'ven't read
it very carefully recently.
> Thanks.
>
> -Robin
No, I am the one who needs to be thanking *you*.
- Timo
komfo,amonan
> FOLLOWUPS TO: The main list.
>
> OK, been promising it for a while; here it is.
>
> http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
>
> There are all *sorts* of finicky details we could discuss, but right
> now I and others would very much just like to get a sense of where
> the community stands on these sorts of issues, so, if we could
> *please* keep the discussion for now (1) on the main list and (2)
> agree/disagree answer to the following question, after you've read
> (as much as you wish to) of the essay:
>
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
Disagree {.i ie nai}
mu'o mi'e komfn
Brian Robertson
Huggles.
Arnt Richard Johansen
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
I used to believe that the most important thing for the regular user and learner of Lojban was that the language should not change from under their feet, so that the effort spent learning it would not go to waste.
But the responses I've seen to this poll from beginners and old-timers alike have convinced me that, if this was the prevailing opinion fifteen years ago, it is certainly not the prevailing opinion now.
It does give me pause that the LLG now appears to be on the course to breaking the promise it made in CLL in 1997: “You can learn the language described here with assurance that (unlike previous versions of Lojban and Loglan, as well as most other artificial languages) it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters.” But, since the community does not seem to care that much about stability, maybe that does not after all represent a fatal blow to the LLG's credibility?
In any case, from now on I will stop arguing for conservatism on behalf of a silent majority that turns out to nothing but a product of confirmation bias and wishful thinking.
(I may still protest if the BPFK tries to effect a change that I, personally, find too difficult to learn, but I don't expect such objections to carry much force.)
--
Arnt Richard Johansen http://arj.nvg.org/
The names of a species, empire, language, homeworld, homestar and so
on will all be self-evidently related; Ogrons come from Ogros,
Arisians come from Arisia, Arcturans come from Arcturus, and Humans no
doubt come from Humus. --Justin B. Rye in A Primer In SF Xenolinguistics
Luke Bergen
Robin Lee Powell
task of making these sorts of decisions; if you're worried, join up
and help.
As far as I'm aware, no-one is proposing the sorts of things you're
worried about.
-Robin
> > lojban+un...@googlegroups.com<lojban%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .
> > For more options, visit this group at
> > http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
> >
> >
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
>
--
Alan Post
> On Mon, Apr 05, 2010 at 02:02:25PM -0700, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> > I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> > current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> > Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
> >
> > Agree or disagree?
>
> I used to believe that the most important thing for the regular user and learner of Lojban was that the language should not change from under their feet, so that the effort spent learning it would not go to waste.
>
> But the responses I've seen to this poll from beginners and old-timers alike have convinced me that, if this was the prevailing opinion fifteen years ago, it is certainly not the prevailing opinion now.
>
> It does give me pause that the LLG now appears to be on the course to breaking the promise it made in CLL in 1997: “You can learn the language described here with assurance that (unlike previous versions of Lojban and Loglan, as well as most other artificial languages) it will not be subject to further fiddling by language-meisters.” But, since the community does not seem to care that much about stability, maybe that does not after all represent a fatal blow to the LLG's credibility?
>
> In any case, from now on I will stop arguing for conservatism on behalf of a silent majority that turns out to nothing but a product of confirmation bias and wishful thinking.
>
> (I may still protest if the BPFK tries to effect a change that I, personally, find too difficult to learn, but I don't expect such objections to carry much force.)
>
I've wondered, either through wording of the question Robin posed,
or from the frame established by the essay itself, whether there is
an environment here that has made it difficult to hold another/the
other position.
I'm personally a bit surprised to have not heard more voices across
the "agree" spectrum. I can't conclude from that silence that they
aren't there, as it would be more likely they are marginalized by
the current atmosphere.
I personally am interested in hearing more voices on the other side(s)
of this issue.
-Alan
Robin Lee Powell
> I've wondered, either through wording of the question Robin posed,
> or from the frame established by the essay itself, whether there
> is an environment here that has made it difficult to hold
> another/the other position.
Arnt was the primary person on the other side, from my POV; he
helped me word the question (which, you'll notice, was phrased from
his side). He expected there to be lots of people on his side; that
was why we did the question in the first place.
> I'm personally a bit surprised to have not heard more voices
> across the "agree" spectrum. I can't conclude from that silence
> that they aren't there, as it would be more likely they are
> marginalized by the current atmosphere.
>
> I personally am interested in hearing more voices on the other
> side(s) of this issue.
So am I, but I haven't been able to find any.
Matt Arnold
Our humble proposition is merely "more than zero change". Do not
conflate that with "zero stability". There is a spectrum.
The LLG is tasked with solving problems that Lojban *users*-- such as
me-- often don't even realize exist. I've studied Lojban for years,
and the proposed changes I have heard are so obscure that I have never
learned the things that I would have to un-learn. The rug is not being
pulled out from under us-- the BPFK will tie up the loose ends to
repair the frayed edges of the rug. To put it another way, if these
changes prove a handicap to someone, this is a "princess and the pea"
scenario. A massive oversensitivity to change that is merely "more
than zero".
-Eppcott
On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Arnt Richard Johansen <a...@nvg.org> wrote:
And Rosta
--And.
Robin Lee Powell, On 07/04/2010 21:59:
>>> breaking the promise it made in CLL in 1997: �You can learn the language
>>> described here with assurance that (unlike previous versions of Lojban and
>>> Loglan, as well as most other artificial languages) it will not be subject
>>> to further fiddling by language-meisters.� But, since the community does not
Stela Selckiku
.i .au jbobau spuda
.i la .camgusmis. teryrei cusku zoi
.glico.
I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
Agree or disagree?
.glico.
.i mi na tugni .i .au la .lojban. binxo lo plixau xagmau
.i ji'a mi tugni la .epkat. noi cusku zoi
.glico.
Our humble proposition is merely "more than zero change". Do not
conflate that with "zero stability". There is a spectrum.
.glico.
.i lo nu troci lo nu la .lojban. prane cu daspo .ie
.i ku'i tu'e
zenba lo ka racli kei lo ba'e cmalu
.i je go'i lo ka plixau
.i je go'i lo ka frili ve ctuca
.i je go'i lo ka melbi
tu'u
.i .ia kakne la'e di'u .i je .ia .au be'u sarcu
.i je .ia .i'e .ui .au .a'u .a'o ba zi .uo sai fasnu
ni'o mi kakne lo nu jbota'a li'a .i mi cusku dei .i pu lo nu cusku dei
.e di'u kei mi ze'u tadni so'i za'e jbocizra .i mi za'e jbotadni .i mi
za'e jbocli .i mi zivle lo clani temci lo nu cilre .i ku'i mi na terpa
lo nu binxo .i pe'a ma'a na binxo lo za'e malcinki .i ma'a binxo ba'a
lo ba'e cinri .u'i
mi'e la stela selckiku
mu'o
Jorge Llambías
> .i ku'i mi na terpa
> lo nu binxo .i pe'a ma'a na binxo lo za'e malcinki .i ma'a binxo ba'a
> lo ba'e cinri .u'i
.i lo ba'e zancinri .a'o .i ko morji fi lo tolci'o ke jungo dapselsku
po'u lu .a'o do jmive ca lo cinri cedra li'u
ni'o ui doi stela mi gleki lo nu do zancinri pilno lo bangu be ma'a
mu'o mi'e xorxes
Efrain Caro
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
>
> Agree or disagree?
na tugni
--
Bob LeChevalier
following makes sense on its own, so I am posting it first, but it
exists within the context of the other posting that I am not quite ready
to post.
Matt Arnold wrote:
> I have been drifting out of the community for the past couple of years
> through discouragement. I used to have such grand dreams for the
> project, but most of those plans turned out to be dependent on the
> BPFK finishing Lojban.
I still have those grand dreams.
> I thought work was proceeding apace, behind the scenes, and that the
> only problem was generating enough work. It now turns out to have been
> actively held back by a dispute between description of usage, and
> prescription through centralized planning.
And it shouldn't have been, because until the byfy work is done,
centralized planning is required.
> In a community this size, usage is a statistically insignificant sample.
On most of the issues remaining undecided, I would probably agree.
> We have no known means to measure or prove anything about usage.
I'm not sure about this. Jorge, for example, argued that xorlo is
pretty much transparent in terms of actual usage, a claim that could not
be made if your statement were true.
> It is also a self-contradicting authority.
The point is that it isn't an "authority". Most natural languages do
quite well without any sort of "authority" deciding correctness. In the
one noteworthy exception, French, the attempts to exercise that
authority are largely ignored by actual speakers of the language.
"Let usage decide" was a recognition of this inevitability. It was a
desired LONG TERM state. The byfy work of formalizing the baseline was
understood as a PRECONDITION to building the usage base to the level
where it becomes possible for "usage to decide".
Somehow or another, it got turned around so that people think that byfy
cannot decide anything UNLESS usage exists sufficient to decide.
That certainly was not *my* intent. I wanted byfy to document the
status quo, whatever it is, with any conflict resolved in favor of what
people call the "conservative" prescription, UNLESS there is significant
usage (or unless something was demonstrably "broken", such as the typos
in CLL that are up for correction).
If there isn't usage enough, and the prescription is vague, then of
course byfy was to be deciding things by fiat, in order to eliminate
that vagueness where possible.
The bias for conservatism is intended as a bulwark against arbitrary
change, and especially that based on aesthetics which is both transient
and heavily English-biased, so long as there is more talking *about*
Lojban than there is talking *in* Lojban.
Of course, for some issues, the best way to demonstrate the need for
change is through usage. But Cowan and I had for several years
demonstrated how you can have controlled change under the baseline
system. For 4 years or so, every change to the formal grammar was
documented in a change proposal which stated the status quo and the
reason for change, and the resulting formal change to the documentation.
I had intended that byfy do the same, documenting the status quo, and
accumulating formal proposals to be decided (separately from the
documentation effort). But not one change proposal, even xorlo, has
ever stated what would change in CLL or the "cmavo list" as a result of
that proposal, even though those are the only two manifestations of the
baseline that seem relevant. (The byfy product will presumably become a
third, but we cannot formally change what hasn't yet been written).
> Usage in the wild has no mechanism with
> which to resolve disputes with other usage.
In real life, it does, obviously, because you and I and others
(including several non-native speakers) are communicating in English and
making ourselves understood, and yet we are not speaking the same way
Chaucer or Shakespeare did. The language has evolved, slowly, because
"usage has decided".
But I agree that Lojban isn't at that point yet, and cannot reach that
point without byfy completing its work.
>No wonder we were in a permanent bottleneck.
And we will remain so, unless we can complete the byfy project in some
sort of mutually acceptable way, because people demand a prescription as
a starting point.
(It is NOT clear that people will demand a later re-prescription after
usage of the baselined language is well-established. I have tried to
have us wait until then to decide and then have the decision made by the
people actually using the language.)
> We let talented people go to waste for nearly a decade. This has been
> a disaster.
I don't think it has been a disaster. The community has continued to
grow, and maybe now we finally have enough people to get the job done (I
hope).
I do not accept it.
But you *have* accepted it up until now, and you are wearing one of the
key hats in the organization. I stepped aside several years ago because
people perceived that I was in the way of getting things done. Robin
took over some of my hats, and has gotten an immense amount done.
You've taken over order fulfillment and turned that around, for which I
have much appreciation.
But if you don't accept the status quo in the byfy work, and think that
talent is going to waste, what are *you* doing about it?
> The "let usage decide" policy was put in place to prevent a recurrance
> of the James Cooke Brown failure mode--
No. "letting usage decide", had nothing to do with JCB.
The policy of having a formal baseline, and being resistant to change
imposed from on high was a response to one aspect of JCB's failure - the
inability to get people to stop talking about the language (and
endlessly proposing changes) and start using it. We've largely
accomplished that much. People use the language, and ask "how to say
it" questions.
> a failure mode which is no longer possible in the current environment.
I wish.
I can easily imagine a huge number of people deserting the project if,
for example, a sufficiently radical orthography change was proposed by
someone and adopted by the byfy. Whether that would kill the project is
hard to say, but any mass exodus in response to an official change from
'on high' would be precisely "the James Cooke Brown failure mode".
> We need a policy that
> mitigates the failure mode we're seeing, not the one that threatened
> us decades ago. Now our failure mode is lack of decisiveness. It is
> the responsibility of centralized authority to break the impasse that
> happens when you let usage *totally* decide, rather than influence.
.oicai
Until byfy gets its job done, "let usage decide" is NOT the policy, so
you and others should stop blaming it. byfy HAS the authority to
*totally* decide.
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Official+Baseline+Statement
is the policy.
The reference to "let usage decide" incorporated from the 1997 baseline
statement is preceded by these words:
> The following material from the 1997 baseline declaration is reiterated
> in the current statement, with a couple of notes as indicated. These
> statements apply after the language baseline is declared complete and
> the freeze is again imposed.
Note that second sentence. "Let usage decide" applies ONLY after byfy
finishes.
> Robin's plan is now well underway and it will succeed.
Which plan is that? He wrote an essay which is being debated. There is
a proposal at the end that doesn't in fact deal with the current byfy
paralysis, so far as I can tell, but rather talks about what will happen
at some future time when byfy has actually gotten its original job done.
If Robin's essay needs a formal change to the policy, it will be up to
the member's meeting to approve it, since they approved the current policy.
> I have confidence that the tide is overwhelmingly on our side.
On whose side? What other side is there?
In consensus politics, there shouldn't be "sides" in the sense you seem
to be using the term. The goal is agreement, not winning a battle.
> That will
> prevent me going away. But I will not remain in a project that is
> committed to an indefinite holding pattern.
Why are we in an indefinite holding pattern? And what specifically do
you want to *do* to change that pattern?
Redefining byfy's long-term role in the language community doesn't seem
likely to change anything NOW. It won't get a cmavo dictionary done.
It won't get CLL revised to incorporate xorlo and other decisions that
have been made, etc.
And if we can't get people to do the necessary work, then stagnation
will continue no matter how much the policy is fiddled with.
lojbab
Luke Bergen
lojbab
Jorge Llambías
>
> Most natural languages do quite
> well without any sort of "authority" deciding correctness. In the one
> noteworthy exception, French, the attempts to exercise that authority are
> largely ignored by actual speakers of the language.
I think you misunderstand the role of the French Academy. You are
probably correct about "most natural languages", but among the large
standardized languages, it is English, not French, that is the odd man
out. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
English still has its "authorities", but they are more informal, such
as prestigious dictionaries.
BTW, the LLG is listed there as the regulator for Lojban, but with
Robin's proposal that would have to change to the BPFK.
Bob LeChevalier
> On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 04:05:56AM -0400, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
>
>>Lojban needs to remain stable and resistant to change, especially
>>in the near term. When numbers of Lojbanists and formal
>>documentation are both strong enough, then "improvements" will
>>generally be made by usage, not by fiat, with skilled Lojbanists
>>being the only ones having the capability to demonstrate and
>>explain their variant usages in-language, and other skilled
>>Lojbanists voting-with-their-usage to adopt the variation.
>
> The problem is this will never, ever happen. Knowing Lojbanists as
> I do, what would actually happen is we'd argue about things and then
> decide what to adopt explicitely, and *then* go out and use it.
> This is very much not anything like real language drift, which is
> what you seem to have in mind.
Actually I think it is, although most language drift changes take place
without the debate. But clearly the replacement of "-man" by "-person"
in many English words, and the loss of the traditional use of the word
"gay" are examples of language drift that was strongly influenced by
debate. Some people have tried to implement gender-neutral third person
pronouns, usually with some amount of debate or explanation. Some use
them without explanation and somehow are understood anyway. Any attempt
to actually make such a pronoun "standard" would however cause enormous
acrimonious debate.
In your scenario, if the arguments were taking place solely in Lojban,
and decision to adopt was informal and applied only to those who agreed
to adopt it and they then used it, setting examples for the rest of us
to either emulate or ignore, then I cannot imagine anything better.
If I ever "adopt" xorlo in my own work, it will almost certainly be
because I unconsciously do so based on exemplary usages by others.
Depending on what the change was, and who did the adopting, I would
imagine that byfy would certify text written with the change either as
II.3 (baseline-compliant with minor variants) or III (LLG approved
author). Of course, level IV usage needs no approval.
lojbab
Robin Lee Powell
> > And what specifically do you want to *do* to change that pattern?
>
> From my perspective, Bob, one really significant change comes from the first
> bullet point:
>
> The BPFK should be open to anyone who is seriously working
> on learning the language
>
> That proposal alone seems like it could have a huge effect on the
> potential future success of the BPFK. I can think of a few people
> off the top of my head who are extremely interested in lojban and
> seem to have some good ideas about it that aren't on the BPFK
> official.
That's *ALWAYS* been the case. I've *begged* people to join the
BPFK. Begged and begged and begged and begged. I always get utter
silence.
.o'o nai sai
> Please correct me if I'm wrong Robin, but I think one of your
> hopes for this proposal is that the community actually take more
> of an active role in defining the language. Where "community"
> does NOT mean "noobs who come to the list and complain that x, y,
> and z don't make sense" but rather "people who know the language
> and have real ideas about how to improve/fix it".
Actually, I've long since totally given up on that; the people who
are willing to do the hard/tedious work (which is basically me,
xorxes and Arnt) are all we're ever going to get, as far as I can
tell. I've been trying to find new people who are willing to do
actual work that needs doing (as opposed to their own pet projects)
for nigh on 10 years now; I fucking give up. If someone shows up,
great, but I'm not looking or expecting.
My major hope was to give xorxes and I the freedom to actually fix
things (which it seems we have the mandate from the community on),
and bring Arnt to our side (apparently also done).
I'm willing to do the grunt work of filling in all the boring BPFK
sections, which no-one else seems to be, but I was not willing to do
it if my work was going to be blocked by the conservative arm of the
BPFK at every turn; since this now conists solely of Bob, I'm less
worried, and expect to get to work soon.
Robin Lee Powell
> In your scenario, if the arguments were taking place solely in
> Lojban, and decision to adopt was informal and applied only to
> those who agreed to adopt it and they then used it, setting
> examples for the rest of us to either emulate or ignore, then I
> cannot imagine anything better.
Whereas I think that's a horrible idea, and want to avoid it if at
all possible. In-Lojban debates leading to BPFK decisions are what
I want.
As Arnt said in IRC, "Let One Flower Bloom!".
(time to make ".a'o sai pa xurla cu tsali banro" t-shirts :)
Bob LeChevalier
> Just to clarify, we're not talking about huge re-constructional changes
> here are we? We're talking about things like xorlo and dotside. If I
> have to re-learn the gismu that I know now and re-understand a new tense
> system, I would change my vote. But as I suspect that what RLPowell is
> talking about is nothing so drastic as all that, I'm ok with change.
I see nothing in Robin's proposal that restricts the degree of change
that could be permitted. backwards-compatability is 4th among 4 goals,
and the other three are sufficiently broad in scope that it likely would
never come into play (indeed, "unlike other languages" sounds like a
guaranteed force for huge-reconstructional change).
Imposing a well-defined but unique tonal system using a
Unicode-compatible but utterly weird alphabet would seem to ideally fit
all of the first three goals.
So adopting his proposal means accepting whatever the powers that be
decide meets the criteria, and hoping for their goodwill. Robin may be
a good guy who would never abuse the authority, but he is only one
person. We don't know that the byfy of 5 years from now will even
include Robin (or that he won't be outvoted by his own 80% rule as a
result of someone packing the vote - since anyone who wants to can
apparently be part of byfy and vote).
If we were at the point where all such discussion of change was taking
place only in Lojban, and byfy was doing its work only in Lojban, I
would be far less worried.
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
> One can imagine certain sensible rules of thumb applying, such as "If a
> given improvement would result in nontrivial amounts of relearning, then
> it is appropriate for Logban3 but not for Lojban". (Better change that
> to "If a given improvement would result in nontrivial amounts of
> relearning, then it is appropriate for Logban3 but not for Lojban,
> *unless it is a fix for something that is broken*" -- I'm thinking of
> the pre-xorlo gadri system, the extraordinarily intense attempts to fix
> which led to the establishment of the BPFK and its completely
> irreconcilable various goals.
!!!???
The gadri system had absolutely nothing to do with the establishment of
the byfy. It never even entered my mind.
The attempts to deal with gadri were primarily undertaken by the byfy
under Nick's leadership, and I cannot fault his efforts at leadership on
that issue.
It was my failure to get a revised cmavo list (compatible with CLL) and
the ensuing dictionary done despite many promises over many years that
made byfy necessary. The job needed to be delegated out of my hands to
a committee, while preserving all the good aspects that my prior role
(which was too much akin to benevolent dictator before Cowan, and was at
risk of becoming so again when he indicated burnout after CLL was done).
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
> From my perspective, Bob, one really significant change comes from the
> first bullet point:
> The BPFK should be open to anyone who is seriously working on learning
> the language
>
> That proposal alone seems like it could have a huge effect on the
> potential future success of the BPFK. I can think of a few people off
> the top of my head who are extremely interested in lojban and seem to
> have some good ideas about it that aren't on the BPFK official.
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong Robin, but I think one of your hopes for
> this proposal is that the community actually take more of an active role
> in defining the language. Where "community" does NOT mean "noobs who
> come to the list and complain that x, y, and z don't make sense" but
> rather "people who know the language and have real ideas about how to
> improve/fix it".
As byfy jatna, Robin has complete authority to add to, or subtract from,
the membership of byfy based on whatever parameters he chooses. He
could in theory be overridden by the Board or the membership if he did
something abusive of this power. But adding more people who know the
language isn't likely to ever be one of them.
It is the "improve/fix it" that doesn't yet belong. The byfy should be
completing the documentation of the status quo, and THEN can consider
fixes or improvements which are NECESSARY for the language to succeed.
Then, after the documentation is done and the baseline is declared,
discussion of possible changes by anyone who knows the language well
enough to discuss their ideas in Lojban is fair game, with the rules
forbidding any official decision to make a change for at least 5 years
(what people decide or agree to do before then is "letting usage decide").
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
> I'm proposing setting a group of experienced Lojbanists with the
> task of making these sorts of decisions; if you're worried, join up
> and help.
Your proposal doesn't say that. It says:
> The BPFK should be open to anyone who is seriously working on learning the language
That includes newbies who want to learn the language, but haven't
actually gotten the experience. And it could include people whose
motivation for learning the language is rather heavily oriented towards
the "unlike other languages" goal.
> As far as I'm aware, no-one is proposing the sorts of things you're
> worried about.
Shall Lojban become officially hexadecimal, anyone? %^(
guaspi exists and was invented by someone who qualified for the byfy
under your proposal at the time.
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
> Our humble proposition is merely "more than zero change". Do not
> conflate that with "zero stability". There is a spectrum.
What, in the proposal, promises anything other than zero stability, or
limits the amount or degree of change?
I see nothing that does either.
> The LLG is tasked with solving problems that Lojban *users*-- such as
> me-- often don't even realize exist.
byfy, I presume.
> I've studied Lojban for years,
> and the proposed changes I have heard are so obscure that I have never
> learned the things that I would have to un-learn.
That is because the existing policy was designed with that in mind.
Robin's proposal has backwards compatibility and un-learning at the
bottom of the priority list, coming into play ONLY with all of the other
three priorities indecisive.
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
> BTW, the LLG is listed there as the regulator for Lojban, but with
> Robin's proposal that would have to change to the BPFK.
The BPFK is a committee of LLG and has no independent authority, and can
have none. (As I see it, Robin's proposal requires LLG membership
approval.)
But other than timing, I am not sure that I see much difference. The
membership and the Board both recognized the need to delegate the
authority to a quasi-independent body.
lojbab
And Rosta
My possibly inaccurate recollection of my possibly inaccurate impression at the time is that Nick returned to Lojban after an absence of some years, and he was temperamentally a Conservative but also had enough linguistic nous to understand the Revisionists' arguments that the Lojban specification was massively incomplete and in some respects broken, most devastatingly in the gadri system (given its centrality to the language). (At the time Nick first went Lojban-inactive, the prevailing view was that CLL was going to be pretty much the final word on the specification of Lojban (lacking only the dictionary to be complete). Over the next few years the delusionality of that view became clear to those capable of understanding the issues.) On behalf of the board, Nick then announced the BPFK and led it. My impression at the time was that he was the moving force behind the BPFK, and its constitution did seem redolent of his approach to Lojban and linguistics, and that the Board b
acked him as a trusty Conservative with expertise in linguistics.
--And.
Jorge Llambías
> Jorge Llambías wrote:
>>
>> BTW, the LLG is listed there as the regulator for Lojban, but with
>> Robin's proposal that would have to change to the BPFK.
>
> The BPFK is a committee of LLG and has no independent authority, and can
> have none. (As I see it, Robin's proposal requires LLG membership
> approval.)
As I see it, it doesn't. The BPFK can just declare its independence
and establish its own charter. If the business organization in turn
wants to give its approval and recognize the BPFK as an independent
body, all the better of course, and it would also have to approve, for
example, any eventual financing by the LLG of a publication of BPFK
material.
But this is not a proposal addressed to the LLG membership. It is a
proposal addressed to the Lojban community, to create a language
regulator that will take care of regulating their language.
> But other than timing, I am not sure that I see much difference. The
> membership and the Board both recognized the need to delegate the authority
> to a quasi-independent body.
The people involved in LLG and BPFK are mostly the same people, so it
makes little difference in practice, but the idea as I understand it
is for the BPFK to become an independent body, only concerned with the
language, not a quasi-independent committee of a business
organization.
Robin Lee Powell
I had no particular intention of completely splitting out the BPFK;
I don't see the point. The community considers the LLG in charge of
the language, and I see no need to rock the boat in that respect.
My intention is to bring to the LLG membership a proposal for the
BPFK's quasi-independence under a new charter.
If that doesn't work (which would, it seems to me, be the LLG
over-riding the community), then we can talk about your plan. :)
Robin Lee Powell
> Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >I'm proposing setting a group of experienced Lojbanists with the
> >task of making these sorts of decisions; if you're worried, join
> >up and help.
>
> Your proposal doesn't say that. It says:
>
> >The BPFK should be open to anyone who is seriously working on
> >learning the language
I don't see a particularily significant difference in practice, and
neither of these are my *actual* formal proposal.
> That includes newbies who want to learn the language, but haven't
> actually gotten the experience.
Yep. And if such people outnumber the oldbies on the BPFK (which is
staggeringly unlikely, since the BPFK is going to be boring as hell
most of the time), then things might get a bit weird. I'm not
actually worried about it, though.
> And it could include people whose motivation for learning the
> language is rather heavily oriented towards the "unlike other
> languages" goal.
Sure could. Are they not part of the community?
> >As far as I'm aware, no-one is proposing the sorts of things
> >you're worried about.
>
> Shall Lojban become officially hexadecimal, anyone? %^(
>
> guaspi exists and was invented by someone who qualified for the
> byfy under your proposal at the time.
Doesn't bother me in the slightest; that's only one person. The
BPFK is currently stacked with people with massive amounts of Lojban
experience; it is up to them where it goes from here.
I further note that almost none of the current BPFK members have
done any actual *work*. If the only people willing to get anything
done are newbs, then newbs will define the language, and you (and
all the other people on the BPFK who have done nothing) will have
only yourselves to blame.
In practice, though, I'm really not worried about that sort of issue
at all. The BPFK is full of real Lojban users who really don't want
to have their current knowledge screwed over, and I have no
intention of making it very easy to pass things in the BPFK.
-Robin
Robin Lee Powell
> Luke Bergen wrote:
> >Just to clarify, we're not talking about huge re-constructional
> >changes here are we? We're talking about things like xorlo and
> >dotside. If I have to re-learn the gismu that I know now and
> >re-understand a new tense system, I would change my vote. But as
> >I suspect that what RLPowell is talking about is nothing so
> >drastic as all that, I'm ok with change.
>
> I see nothing in Robin's proposal that restricts the degree of
> change that could be permitted.
Except for the idea that we're not surrounded entirely by assholes.
Have some fucking faith in the rest of the Lojban community!
.o'o nai sai
Jorge Llambías
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> I had no particular intention of completely splitting out the BPFK;
> I don't see the point. The community considers the LLG in charge of
> the language, and I see no need to rock the boat in that respect.
I think not every BPFK member is an LLG member, so in effect the BPFK
is not strictly a commitee of the LLG, but those are formalites
anyway.
> My intention is to bring to the LLG membership a proposal for the
> BPFK's quasi-independence under a new charter.
>
> If that doesn't work (which would, it seems to me, be the LLG
> over-riding the community), then we can talk about your plan. :)
As lomg as it is clear that the BPFK's authority comes fom the
community and not from the LLG membership, all is well.
John E Clifford
For newbies and oldbies with failing midterm memories (I'm pretty good on problems in Loglan in 1977), could some one review what dot whatsis is and what (aside from 'lo') is wrong (or was) with gadris.
Jorge Llambías
>
> For newbies and oldbies with failing midterm memories (I'm pretty good on problems in Loglan in 1977), could some one review what dot whatsis is
I think you mean the "dot side". That's the replacement of the
doi-la-lai-la'i restriction on cmevla by the requirement that all
cmevla begin with a pause.
>and what (aside from 'lo') is wrong (or was) with gadris.
What was right with them? :)
I think the main problem was forcing a hidden quantifier (i.e. a bridi
operator) on what should basically be simply a term creator.
Arnt Richard Johansen
>
> For newbies and oldbies with failing midterm memories (I'm pretty good on problems in Loglan in 1977), could some one review what dot whatsis is
It is a solution to a problem that has best been described in an essay by Mark Shoulson on the wiki:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=The%20Case%20Against%20LA
Basically, proficient Lojban speakers have proven unable to prevent the slip-up where the strings “la” or “doi” accidentally appear in nonce names.
We call the variant of Lojban with all cmevla delimited with pauses on both sides “dot side”, in a reference to Star Wars.
> and what (aside from 'lo') is wrong (or was) with gadris.
Well, AFAIK the only serious problem with the Lojban gadri system as described in CLL is that it did not allow for intensional descriptions, or non-distributive plurals. The majority of people who voted on the gadri section in BPFK were of the opinion that Lojban couldn't remain without any kind of expressing intensional descriptions, so “lo” was pressed into service as an article with unspecified intensionality/extensionality.
The pre-publication drafts of the book “Plural Predication” by Thomas McKay was highly influential in this solution. (http://www.amazon.com/Plural-Predication-Thomas-McKay/dp/0199278148/)
--
Arnt Richard Johansen http://arj.nvg.org/
Yxskaftbud, ge vår wczonmö iqhjälp.
Jonathan Jones
On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 12:21:46PM -0700, John E Clifford wrote:
>
> For newbies and oldbies with failing midterm memories (I'm pretty good on problems in Loglan in 1977), could some one review what dot whatsis is
It is a solution to a problem that has best been described in an essay by Mark Shoulson on the wiki:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=The%20Case%20Against%20LA
Basically, proficient Lojban speakers have proven unable to prevent the slip-up where the strings “la” or “doi” accidentally appear in nonce names.
We call the variant of Lojban with all cmevla delimited with pauses on both sides “dot side”, in a reference to Star Wars.
My signature says, basically, "Come to the Dot Side!"
> and what (aside from 'lo') is wrong (or was) with gadris.
Well, AFAIK the only serious problem with the Lojban gadri system as described in CLL is that it did not allow for intensional descriptions, or non-distributive plurals. The majority of people who voted on the gadri section in BPFK were of the opinion that Lojban couldn't remain without any kind of expressing intensional descriptions, so “lo” was pressed into service as an article with unspecified intensionality/extensionality.
The pre-publication drafts of the book “Plural Predication” by Thomas McKay was highly influential in this solution. (http://www.amazon.com/Plural-Predication-Thomas-McKay/dp/0199278148/)
--
Arnt Richard Johansen http://arj.nvg.org/
Yxskaftbud, ge vår wczonmö iqhjälp.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
--
mu'o mi'e .aionys.
.i.a'o.e'e ko klama le bende pe denpa bu
--
John E Clifford
Sean Patrick Santos
Sean Patrick Santos
Minimiscience
skamyxatra.
> BPFK. Begged and begged and begged and begged. I always get utter
> silence.
Really? I've never encountered any of these requests. Maybe I should go on
IRC more. Besides, I thought that in order to join the BPFK you had to be a
member of the LLG, which required "competence" in one of several specific
fields.
Anyway, to get the ball rolling, I suppose I'll request membership. My
qualifications are:
- borderline autistic, obsessive-compulsive, pedantic undergraduate majoring
in computational mathematics
- currently working on Haskell/Perl/C libraries for manipulating Lojban words
& text: <http://github.com/jwodder/jbobaf>
- deep-seated & irrational dislike of cultural {gismu} and the tiki
- knowledge of mathematical operators beyond just the high-school level stuff
in VUhU
- desire to rewrite the entire language specification in a highly formal &
precise manner modeled after the ISO C99 standard. I started this once but
never got past the morphology section.
- desire to rewrite the official {gismu} & {cmavo} lists *without* the
arbitrary 100-ish-character limit on the definition fields (Have you ever
heard of tab-separated values?), merging in definition fragments that were
relegated to the notes fields and generally making everything more
consistent, formal, and normative. I once tried this as part of an attempt
at typesetting a decent dictionary (first with XML, then with JSON) but
never got very far.
- desire to usurp control of the BPFK and LLG as part of my over-arching goal
of world domination. Time permitting, of course.
So, do you send me a funny hat, or do I have to make my own?
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
li'a .e'i ca vondei .i mi na'e pu'i kufra loi vondei
Jim Carter
> http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You're+Doing+It+Wrong
Very good essay. Think French -- a long time ago Lojban Central described
its function to be like the French Academy, which speaks authoritatively
about how the language is defined (despite impure speakers de l'etranger
debasing it). Because Lojban is a "logical language" it even more needs
such an authoritative voice, and Lojban Central should return to that role.
"Let usage decide" is fine for a natural language with no pretense of being
designed, but abdicating the design role -- "a consistent failure to
govern", quoted from the political sphere -- serves our language poorly.
> (2) agree/disagree answer to the following question, after you've read
> (as much as you wish to) of the essay:
>
> I would like Lojban to remain as close as it possibly can to its
> current state, regardless of whether I or a group of experienced
> Lojbanists see that improvements could be made.
Disagree. If an area needs improvement we ought to improve it, and
sometimes the change cannot be guaranteed to be backward-compatible in all
cases. On the other hand, Lojbanists' investment in the language is a very
valuable resource not to be wasted, and wholesale revisions are not
welcome. The revision from Loglan to Lojban was essential for political
reasons, but I hope we won't see anything like that again.
James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: ji...@math.ucla.edu http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)
Robin Lee Powell
> de'i li 08 pi'e 04 pi'e 2010 la'o fy. Robin Lee Powell .fy. cusku
> zoi skamyxatra.
> > That's *ALWAYS* been the case. I've *begged* people to join the
> > BPFK. Begged and begged and begged and begged. I always get
> > utter silence.
>
> .skamyxatra
>
> Really? I've never encountered any of these requests. Maybe I
> should go on IRC more.
It may be a timing thing; I think it's been 4 or more years since
the last one. I meant posts to the main list, though.
> Besides, I thought that in order to join the BPFK you had to be a
> member of the LLG, which required "competence" in one of several
> specific fields.
Nope, and we've never enforced thet competence thing anyways.
> Anyway, to get the ball rolling, I suppose I'll request
> membership. My qualifications are:
>
> - borderline autistic, obsessive-compulsive, pedantic undergraduate majoring
> in computational mathematics
> - currently working on Haskell/Perl/C libraries for manipulating Lojban words
> & text: <http://github.com/jwodder/jbobaf>
> - deep-seated & irrational dislike of cultural {gismu} and the tiki
> - knowledge of mathematical operators beyond just the high-school level stuff
> in VUhU
> - desire to rewrite the entire language specification in a highly formal &
> precise manner modeled after the ISO C99 standard. I started this once but
> never got past the morphology section.
> - desire to rewrite the official {gismu} & {cmavo} lists *without* the
> arbitrary 100-ish-character limit on the definition fields (Have you ever
> heard of tab-separated values?), merging in definition fragments that were
> relegated to the notes fields and generally making everything more
> consistent, formal, and normative. I once tried this as part of an attempt
> at typesetting a decent dictionary (first with XML, then with JSON) but
> never got very far.
> - desire to usurp control of the BPFK and LLG as part of my over-arching goal
> of world domination. Time permitting, of course.
Sounds fine to me. I'm about to restart the BPFK list; I'll post
where to go at that time.
As a side comment, the cmavo and gismu lists largely predate the
concept of TSV files; they're from a time when COBOL was a major
language.
> So, do you send me a funny hat, or do I have to make my own?
You have to make your own.
Robin Lee Powell
On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 12:02:35PM -0600, Sean Patrick Santos wrote:
> Third, your goal number three seems to me to be badly phrased. I
> don't think it's a virtue for lojban to be unlike other languages.
> Actually, that's a bad thing because that makes it harder to use.
> What I think you meant is that lojban should not be too closely
> intertwined with any single language or language family, to the
> extent that it becomes more distant from other widely-spoken
> languages (or more succinctly, lojban should avoid a heavy
> cultural bias).
Acutally, no, I meant exactly what I said: Lojban was formed to test
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and while that's largely irrelevant to
me, it *is* important to me, and many other people, that Lojban is
not like any natural languages in a lot of respects. Makes it all
mind-stretching and stuff.
John E Clifford
----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Lee Powell <rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
-Robin
--
Tom Prince
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 12:01:54PM -0400, Bob LeChevalier wrote:
> > Luke Bergen wrote:
> > >Just to clarify, we're not talking about huge re-constructional
> > >changes here are we? We're talking about things like xorlo and
> > >dotside. If I have to re-learn the gismu that I know now and
> > >re-understand a new tense system, I would change my vote. But as
> > >I suspect that what RLPowell is talking about is nothing so
> > >drastic as all that, I'm ok with change.
> >
> > I see nothing in Robin's proposal that restricts the degree of
> > change that could be permitted.
>
> Except for the idea that we're not surrounded entirely by assholes.
>
> Have some fucking faith in the rest of the Lojban community!
And the fact that if that was going to occur, then it would occur just as
much, and probably in multiple divergent directions, if usage was left to
decide.
Tom Prince
Alan Post
> (the rest of what you said did not seem to need a reply from me)
>
> On Thu, Apr 08, 2010 at 12:02:35PM -0600, Sean Patrick Santos wrote:
> > Third, your goal number three seems to me to be badly phrased. I
> > don't think it's a virtue for lojban to be unlike other languages.
> > Actually, that's a bad thing because that makes it harder to use.
> > What I think you meant is that lojban should not be too closely
> > intertwined with any single language or language family, to the
> > extent that it becomes more distant from other widely-spoken
> > languages (or more succinctly, lojban should avoid a heavy
> > cultural bias).
>
> Acutally, no, I meant exactly what I said: Lojban was formed to test
> the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and while that's largely irrelevant to
> me, it *is* important to me, and many other people, that Lojban is
> not like any natural languages in a lot of respects. Makes it all
> mind-stretching and stuff.
>
+1 to Robin's comment.
-Alan
--
te djuno lo do sevzi
Christopher Doty
Acutally, no, I meant exactly what I said: Lojban was formed to test
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and while that's largely irrelevant to
me, it *is* important to me, and many other people, that Lojban is
not like any natural languages in a lot of respects. Makes it all
mind-stretching and stuff.
Matt Arnold
Lojban has no goal of being widely used. It can be logical and
consistent while also being mindbendingly unusable. That is its past,
current, and continuing plan.
-Matt
Christopher Doty
- Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
- Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
- Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
- Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
- Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
- Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
- Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
- Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
- Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
Matt Arnold
I no longer believe most of that list is true. Making it true would
require leaving behind the predicate grammar, resulting in a language
so new as to be almost unidentifiable as belonging in the Lojban
family.
-Matt
Christopher Doty
John E Clifford
From: Christopher Doty <suomi...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 12:56:44 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.
John E Clifford
From: Christopher Doty <suomi...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 12:56:44 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.
Alan Post
> From [1]lojban.org:
>
> * Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each
> other, and possibly in the future with computers.
> * Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of
> logic.
> * Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds
> into words.
> * Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
> * Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary
> of millions of words.
> * Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
> * Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought
> and communication.
> * Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the
> scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
>
> Where in here is there anything about being mind-bending? There are, as I
> count them, seven things which imply that Lojban is trying to be
> accessible, easy to learn, etc., and in the last point, it is clearly
> point out that Lojban "has a variety of uses." If the use of Lojban is to
> bend minds, what does this list mean, and why is that item missing?
> wrote:
>
My newbie answer to this is the relative symmetry the language has
regarding logical operations, to include those that are difficult
to understand as they are being spoken.
That the mind-bending part is an emergent property of formally
analyzing the "making logical statements" space, rather than being
an explicit design goal.
Christopher Doty
It might be useful to list the ways in which Lojban fails to meet human language standards. I personally can't think of one (even xorlo has, alas, human analogs). Remember that at least one school of linguists think that all sentences in any natural language are merely transforms of predicate logic sentences, with minor loss of information.
Oops. In theory iirc Lojban can require processing depths that no human language in fact has (though I am not sure that there is a theory that says they can't have it) and some parts of Lojban do require keeping in mind the details of the developing sentence structure which again exceed the need in natural languages (again only in fact perhaps).
Michael Everson
On 9 Apr 2010, at 20:31, Christopher Doty wrote:
> I am, very very fortunate not be part of the school of linguistics that believes in silly things like transformations (nor Russel's teapot). When I say that Lojban violates things that human languages do, I'm not appealing in any sense to "Universal Grammar;" I'm simply say that, when you look at the languages of the world (henceforth, "languages"), certain things happen and certain things don't. Maybe they CAN, but the fact that they don't is pretty telling about human brains process speech.
>
> I see two, maybe three, areas where there is a problem from a linguistic perspective. The first is that languages do not have verbs with more than four unmarked slots for a predicate, and there are VERY few that have four; the vast majority of verbs in the vast majority of languages have three or less. If you get more than four, you ALWAYS have some sort of marking (most often as an oblique phrase; i.e., a preposition or a postposition)) that indicates how the additional argument relates to the predicate. Yet, Lojban has gismu which take more than four arguments. If it were testable, I would put a LOT of money the fact that, after Lojban was released into the wild, you could do a text count and find that predicates rarely, if ever, have more than three arguments in them, and that the three arguments pretty much always had the three closest to the gismu.
>
> It is worthwhile to note, especially for those who like Lojban to be mind-bending, that this fact likely has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with cognition. On average, working memory holds something like 4-7 items (try using a phone menu with 9 items; it is extremely annoying and frustrating, and makes it hard to do anything except listen to the list of options). It is thus no surprise that, in languages, four is the maximum (three arguments and a verb, with a couple verbs that take four), especially if one considers that most utterances have more than just the verbs and the arguments. I think this is what you meant by "processing depth"--the problem is that most humans actually CAN'T PROCESS at the depth needed for a gismu with seven places. You could argue that this processing depth is learnable--maybe it is, but I'd bet that learning to hold more in working memory is very closely tied to how much you could process before any training. This also might be fine for a written language, since you can sit and look at a sentence, but in speech, people just aren't going to be able to process Lojban.
>
> The second problem (or second half of this first problem) is that some of the gismu seem to have tons of extra stuff in them that is not something that would be included in the meaning of a word in any language. "Bucket," for example, contains a predicate slot for the material the bucket is made from. This, as far as I could tell, was thrown in to make the gismu have more slots. The material a bucket is made of has far less to do with bucketness than, say, all of the things in klama have to do with going. And why does "bucket" have it and not, say, "bird"? I can call something that isn't a living bird (say, a drawing of a bird), but why doesn't it a gismu slot to indicate it's material? If buckets get a slot for material, so should everything.
>
> Both of these things are easily fixed, though, without totally barfing up Lojban. There might be a few special gismu that have more than four slots, but for most, the additional slots should really be looked at to see if they are needed, along with the weird ones in words like "bucket." A handful of cmavo (or even gismu) for things like "material made of" would be much more widely useable, as would a very general something like "means."
>
> The third thing is more of a pet peeve, and not something I would actually like to see changed (although it is worth considering if a new LoCCan is created), and that is that the process of word creation results in things which are very, very similar--all gismu, for example, have a set structure which is clearly delimited. Although this is very logical and makes it easy to point at a word and tell, completely unambiguously, if it is a gismu or not, it is simply not how languages work. For example, the words for colors in English have no clear relationship to each other, nor that class to the class of intransitive verbs. But, in Lojban, EVERYTHING that makes a predicate looks like everything else that makes a predicate. I would very much doubt that memorizing the 1300 or so gismu in Lojban would be at all comparable to learning 1300 of, say, Spanish, because there is more for your brain to stick to. (This is also part of my objection to Jorge's language-name proposal, but I'll address that separately.)
>
> So, there 'tis--what the linguist doesn't like about Lojban (which, it is worth noting, is far less than what he DOES like, but still).
>
> Chris
>
Christopher Doty
Jorge Llambías
>
> I see two, maybe three, areas where there is a problem from a linguistic
> perspective. The first is that languages do not have verbs with more than
> four unmarked slots for a predicate, and there are VERY few that have four;
> the vast majority of verbs in the vast majority of languages have three or
> less.
That has always been my opinion too. In practice however, there are
some mitigating factors (some of which you mentioned) that makes this
almost a non-issue for Lojban.
One factor is that many argument places are just fluff ("by standard
x", "under conditions x", "of material x", and such) that nobody ever
uses and exist mostly for decoration, and to give headaches to anyone
trying to figure out what rule was used to decide whether to include
them or not in any given argument structure.
Another factor is that In the really few cases where four or five
arguments are more or less justifiable by the meaning of the word,
they are practically never used together. So you might say "mi klama
fu lo karce", but you won't see much or any actual usage with all five
places of "klama" filled.
> I think this is what you meant by "processing
> depth"--the problem is that most humans actually CAN'T PROCESS at the depth
> needed for a gismu with seven places.
I suspect he was referring to center embedding. Structures like "the
dog the cat the mouse feared chased died".
> But, in Lojban, EVERYTHING that makes a
> predicate looks like everything else that makes a predicate.
Not quite. "blanu", "du", "go'i", "fu'ivla", "pavyseljirna",
"bangrsua'ili", "me mi moi", "da zei djan" are all predicates and look
quite different. Even if we only consider gismu, they come in three
different flavours:
CCV,CV
CV,CCV
CVC,CV
all two syllables, but different kind of syllables.
> I would very
> much doubt that memorizing the 1300 or so gismu in Lojban would be at all
> comparable to learning 1300 of, say, Spanish, because there is more for your
> brain to stick to.
For an English speaker, the Spanish words would probably be easier.
For a Chinese speaker, my guess is that the Lojban words would be
easier.
Bob LeChevalier
> >From lojban.org <http://lojban.org>:
>
> * Lojban is designed to be used by people in *communication* with
> each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
> * Lojban has an *unambiguous grammar*, which is based on
> the *principles of logic*.
> * Lojban has *phonetic spelling*, and unambiguous resolution of
> sounds into words.
> * Lojban is *simple* compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
> * Lojban's *1300 root words* can be easily combined to form a
> vocabulary of *millions of words*.
> * Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are *without exception*.
> * Lojban attempts to *remove restrictions* on creative and clear
> thought and communication.
> * Lojban has a *variety of uses*, ranging from the creative to the
> scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
>
> Where in here is there anything about being mind-bending? There are, as
> I count them, seven things which imply that Lojban is trying to be
> accessible, easy to learn, etc., and in the last point, it is clearly
> point out that Lojban "has a variety of uses." If the use of Lojban is
> to bend minds, what does this list mean, and why is that item missing?
In the full introductory brochure that list was taken from, which is now
the book "What is Lojban?", I think you will find that the
'mind-bending' comes in from the "Lojban attempts to *remove
restrictions* on creative and clear thought and communication".
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban+Introductory+Brochure&fullscreen=y
> It is known that people's ideas and thought change somewhat when they
> learn a foreign language. It is not known whether this change is due to
> exposure to a different culture or even just getting outside of ones own
> culture. It is also not known how much (if any) of the change is due to
> the nature of the language, as opposed to the cultural associations.
>
> Unique features of Lojban remove constraints on language in the areas of
> logic, ambiguity, and expressive power, opening up areas of thought
> that have not been easily accessible by human language before.
> Meanwhile, the formal rigidity of the language definition allows
> speakers to carefully control their expressions (and perhaps therefore
> their thought processes). This gives some measure of predictive power
> that can be used in designing and preparing for actual Sapir-Whorf
> experiments.
"opening up areas of thought that have not been easily accessible" =
"mind-bending".
The simple exercise of looking at random tanru of 2 or 3 gismu and
trying to figure out how they would be used, was one of the earliest
games for Lojban learners. The random sentence generator (which has
some examples on the wiki somewhere) was another (I really need to get
the baseline-language revision up there, if it isn't. I finished it a
while ago. But most people aren't into DOS-based programs these days %^)
The area of language acquisition is where this whole thing of "let usage
decide" that has dominated this thread came from. The
prescription/description thing comes from the issue of how the Lojban
language manifests itself in human usage and thinking. Again, from the
brochure:
> Such a pre-definition, a language 'prescription', makes an AL a unique
> tool for studying the nature of language. As people learn the language,
> the way they 'acquire' understanding of that prescription can tell
> scientists how 'natural' the prescribed forms are. Actual usage of the
> language can be compared to the prescription providing quantitative data
> on specific patterns of usage. As the language evolves from its
> relatively pristine initial state, it may deviate from its prescription.
> Such deviations will better inform researchers as to the properties of
> a 'natural' language. The process of language change itself will be open
> to investigation in a way never before possible. Finally, the existence
> of a relatively complete language prescription at the birth of the
> language means that a 'description' of actual usage after that initial
> state can be more simply created, maintained, and studied.
>
> Lojban is undoubtedly the most carefully designed and defined AL ever
> created. All aspects of its design have been carefully engineered by
> several people encompassing expertise in a variety of disciplines,
> including linguistics. The language prescription is similarly the most
> complete of any language. As such, it serves as a unique basis for the
> study of language usage and language change.
>
> A new language like Lojban, with no native speakers, is a 'pidgin'. As
> the language evolves, native speakers of other languages will learn it,
> and will bring into their Lojban usage the perspective and patterns of
> their native language. This interaction process, called 'creolization',
> affects all languages, and may be the principle cause of language
> change. As Lojban is learned by speakers of a variety of natural
> languages, this process can be studied directly in a way never before
> possible, with the language prescription serving as a standard by which
> deviations associated with speaker origin, and evolution of usage, can
> be measured and described in detail.
My wife Nora tends to think about mind-bending in the random sentence
generator sense. I tend to think about it in terms of the effects of
learning a new and very different language on human thought. I've long
thought that the attitudinals and liberated systematic emotional
expression (random attitudinals rather than random tanru? -
.ei.e'ero'u.o'anai is mind-bending for me) are more likely to result in
"Sapir-Whorf effects" than the formal-logic aspects, but we'll find out.
In this context, we see why my focus has been on language description,
rather than prescription, once the baseline is done and (hopefully) a
lot more people are learning the language. A language is first and
foremost something people use to communicate, and once there is more
usage than discussion-about-the-language, I think that the transition in
the role of byfy and the language standard effort in general will
naturally shift.
lojbab
Bob LeChevalier
There aren't many Lojban words with more than 4 places, where there are,
as with klama, the interrelationship of the places may help to keep them
in mind destination-origin-route all go together, so when saying a
Lojban bridi based on klama with all 5 places expressed, in my
experience actually speaking the language, places 2-3-4 tend to unify
mentally (and I have used all 5 places of klama in speech, though x5
tends to be obvious most of the time and doesn't need to be spoken). I
think other verbs of motion that parallel klama work the same way.
It is easy to break this unity - terklama might be unusable as a
predicate in fluent speech because it breaks up that unity. We'll find
out, won't we?
fanva is the other 5 placer that I have actually used in speech with all
5 places.
I haven't used jutsi to express a full Linnean classification of a
creature. I doubt if I would do so other than in writing, but I imagine
the ordering would allow the spoken form to be understood, even if there
are 7 or 8 places (not sure of the maximum if one goes from subspecies
to kingdom with all possible intermediates), and indeed omitting an
intermediate would be what makes it incomprehensible no matter how well
marked.
But the too-many-chunks-in-mind problem would already exist in Lojban,
no matter how many places are assigned to gismu. Just start plunking
abstraction bridi in a couple of the sumti of the main bridi, each with
their own sumti, or add some relative clauses. It is trivial to make a
Lojban sentence "too complicated".
IIRC, the TLI equivalent of tikpa had 6 places.
> The second problem (or second half of this first problem) is that some
> of the gismu seem to have tons of extra stuff in them that is not
> something that would be included in the meaning of a word in any
> language. "Bucket," for example, contains a predicate slot for the
> material the bucket is made from. This, as far as I could tell, was
> thrown in to make the gismu have more slots.
No. It was an attempt to be systematic, and to make the place
structures easier to memorize. A job I did imperfectly, I admit - the
systematization came rather late.
The real reason is probably that JCB had a material place for some
containers, and preserving compatibility with the TLI language for
possible remerging was still a significant priority even after the
original baselining of the gismu list, at which point people started
actively fighting me if I wanted to change place structures even for
good reasons.
Baselining and avoiding relearning were REALLY BIG issues in those days.
More people left the project, or refused to learn the language because
we weren't yet willing to "stop tinkering, get the dictionary done, and
let go of the language so people can use it", than for any other reason
by far. (CLL was originally a section of the dictionary that grew to
book length).
> The material a bucket is
> made of has far less to do with bucketness than, say, all of the things
> in klama have to do with going. And why does "bucket" have it and not,
> say, "bird"?
IIRC, all of the "container" gismu have a material place. At least
etymologically, I think that "glass" and "stein" are distinct from "cup"
mostly in their material. We had other examples, but it was a way to
make one gismu cover a family of words in other languages.
The ability to use gismu in lujvo (including with SE and NU) to make
multiple common words, in order to both keep the lexicon small and to be
consistent with Zipf's law was a major factor in choosing the gismu.
> I can call something that isn't a living bird (say, a
> drawing of a bird), but why doesn't it a gismu slot to indicate it's
> material? If buckets get a slot for material, so should everything.
that is what BAI, and fi'o are for - to arbitrarily add any desired
place to a predicate.
> Both of these things are easily fixed, though, without totally barfing
> up Lojban.
The thought of even opening up the issue again brings precisely that
phrase to mind.
Debates over change to the language get very heated very easily.
"Fixing" is NOT easy for anyone who thinks about the people who aren't
actively involved in the current discussion (Lojban List has over 400
members; I doubt if any single thread ever gets more than 10% of them to
comment. CLL has sold over 500 copies, maybe even 600 by now, and I
suspect that accounts for less than half of the people who try to learn
the language.
> So, there 'tis--what the linguist doesn't like about Lojban (which, it
> is worth noting, is far less than what he DOES like, but still).
The early debates, when linguistics considerations dominated more than
logical perfection, would probably be interesting to you. JL has a lot
of it, early Lojban List has more, and references to Lojban on sci.lang
and more rarely on Linguist List when I actively participated in both
were especially relevant.
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Why+Learn+Lojban%253F
has links to some of these at the bottom of the page.
--
Bob LeChevalier loj...@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
Robin Lee Powell
> If Lojban wants to be mind-bending, awesome. If it wants to be a
> language which is logical and consistent, and thus primed to make
> in-roads in being widely used, also awesome. But it can't do both
> of those things.
I totally disagree; it is exactly the logical and consistent parts
that are the most mind-bending. That's not how human languages
normally work.
John E Clifford
It will not surprise you that one of the first suggestions that went into the LoCCan3 file was that no predicate have more that three arguments (with the possible exception of 'klama' where all actually seemed to fit). In particular, there are a lot of items that turn up on hundreds of predicates and are relevant to all in the same -- non-essential -- way ("of material" is good. "in respect" is another and we could go on -- and doubtless will). We have JCB to thank for this, of course: he wanted to define everything using the fewest number of terms but without the fudging that such attempts ("Philosophical Languages") usually involve. So he packed as much as he felt he reasonably could into each predicate (maybe a bit more). One result of this is that, when you go to the concept in the lebbenty-lebbenth place, it comes with a mass of irrelevant hangers-on (and with different ones when you get it from different places, even when the intention is that the concept be the same) (Of course, he quickly moved on to the usual fudging anyhow.) Oh yeah, from the logical point of view, filling all those slots with nullity creates a great heave in the semantic mechanism.
Another early suggestion was to build some redundancy into the language. Everything is so tight that one typo throws the whole meaning off into some far off field (I'm sure examples spring to mind from your last fast typing or speaking session). Alas, things are so tight and the tightness is so central to the analytic phase of the linguistics, that it is hard to see how to do it, short of lengthening all the words by a syllable or two, filled with semantic junk.
By the way, Montague would slap my hand (again) for calling his grammar transformational, but that is an easier label to use than trying to explain what actually goes on (though that muddle is very useful in its own right).
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.
MorphemeAddict
There aren't many Lojban words with more than 4 places, where there are, as with klama, the interrelationship of the places may help to keep them in mind destination-origin-route all go together, so when saying a Lojban bridi based on klama with all 5 places expressed, in my experience actually speaking the language, places 2-3-4 tend to unify mentally (and I have used all 5 places of klama in speech, though x5 tends to be obvious most of the time and doesn't need to be spoken). I think other verbs of motion that parallel klama work the same way.
Oren
> Mentioning the end-point before the start-point just seems backwards to me.
>
> stevo
I think the idea is that if you just had the x1 place filled, it still
means 'go' and not 'come.'
Pierre Abbat
> This is an interesting issue, I think, because I see the idea of
> "mind-bending stuff," while certainly very cool, to be diametrically
> opposed to any hope of having Lojban widely adopted as an
> international/auxiliary/talking-to-computers/whatever language--there are
> plenty of things that natural languages do which are plenty mind-bending to
> speakers of English, but they don't violate general principles of what
> languages do and what they don't do, while Lojban does in any number of
> respects.
I don't see many ways Lojban violates general principles of languages. The
following traits are AFAIK unique to the Loglanic family:
*Terminators for grammatical constructs, to enable unambiguous parsing.
*An indefinitely long sequence of verb arguments, instead of a morphosyntactic
alignment.
*Verbs, common nouns, adjectives, and adverbs combined into one part of
speech. But there are universals concerning the combining of these parts of
speech.
*Unambiguously lexable and parsable words (even Esperanto fails that,
as "avaro" can mean either "avarice" or "collection of grandfathers").
There are other language families with unique features. Mayan languages have a
part of speech found in no other languages; Afro-Asiatic has roots consisting
of consonants which are inflected by inserting different vowels; Salishan
languages have words that challenge the notion of syllable.
But when I compared Lojban to a list of universals, I found only one clear
violation (and a lot of n/a's): in a phrase like "these three blue houses",
if all three modifiers are on the same side of the head word, the number is
in the middle of the three. The Lojban is "ci vi blanu zdani", and the word
for "these" is a spatial tense.
Pierre
--
When a barnacle settles down, its brain disintegrates.
Já não percebe nada, já não percebe nada.
Jorge Llambías
>
> But when I compared Lojban to a list of universals, I found only one clear
> violation (and a lot of n/a's): in a phrase like "these three blue houses",
> if all three modifiers are on the same side of the head word, the number is
> in the middle of the three. The Lojban is "ci vi blanu zdani", and the word
> for "these" is a spatial tense.
"ci (lo) vi blanu zdani" is "three of these blue houses", so in the
same order as in English.
"these three blue houses" is closer to "lo ci vi blanu zdani", and
it's hard to say whether it is "lo" or "vi" that contributes the most
to the meaning of "these". The definiteness does not come from "vi" in
any case, only the proximity.
And Rosta
--And.
Pierre Abbat, On 10/04/2010 02:07:
Bob LeChevalier
klama represents two common English verbs in its unconverted form "come"
and "go". In both cases the direct object is the destination. I think
(but cannot recall and my foreign language knowledge is abysmal) that
other languages are the same in putting focus on the destination,
probably because that is the more common or useful "new" information.
In general we tried to make the oblique places (x3 and up) the sorts of
things that might be left elliptical, while allowing them to be
expressed when desired, and most importantly for some words, making
clear that they were part of the "meaning"
(I realize that the above is incredibly sloppy in linguistic
terminology, but I am too rusty to express things more correctly).
lojbab
Robin Lee Powell
> Probably the most fundamentally unnatural and perhaps even
> 'uncognizable' part of Lojban is the formal grammar. The
> structures of the formal grammar are nothing like those found in
> natural languages. And I rather doubt whether anybody does or can
> internalize the formal grammar as part of learning and using
> Lojban;
When I'm in practice, my statements pass the formal parser (mine,
not the official on) on the order of 95 times out of a hundred. I'd
wager real money on that.
Certainly 8 or 9 out of 10 is true for all the serious speakers on
IRC.
I'm really not sure what you're on about here.
Stela Selckiku
>
> This also might be fine for a written language, since you can sit and look at a
> sentence, but in speech, people just aren't going to be able to process Lojban.
As someone who's reasonably fluent in Lojban, I find sitting here and
reading this kind of assertion positively bizarre. In theory I should
have trouble with "klama" and "fanva"? OK, um, interesting
hypothesis-- but we've already done the test: I don't! Actually I can
quite easily understand sentences like "la .bastyn. se klama mi fu lo
karce" (I went to Boston in the car.) or "ma xe fanva fi lo glibau"
(What's a translation into English?), either written or spoken, as
well as producing them fluently. I do it all day long! Remind me
again why I shouldn't be able to??
And also from lojbab:
On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Bob LeChevalier <loj...@lojban.org> wrote:
>
> It is easy to break this unity - terklama might be unusable as a predicate
> in fluent speech because it breaks up that unity. We'll find out, won't we?
I have already found out! I will tell you. It takes a moment to
process a word like "terkla" the first time you see it, and then you
quickly get used to it and stop noticing it. No one becomes fluent in
Lojban as it's spoken today without feeling very comfortable with "te"
converted gismu.
Lojban hasn't proved all that much, but I feel confident in saying
that it's at least falsified this hypothesis, that it's somehow not
even possible to have 5 place gismu. I've never seen a new student
struggle on "klama", and I've never seen people invent circumlocutions
to avoid the supposed mental strain of using the later places of
"klama". We use it every day and it seems to be easy, actually. So,
there's that!
mi'e la stela selckiku
mu'o
Stela Selckiku
<rlpo...@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>
> When I'm in practice, my statements pass the formal parser (mine,
> not the official on) on the order of 95 times out of a hundred. I'd
> wager real money on that.
>
> Certainly 8 or 9 out of 10 is true for all the serious speakers on
> IRC.
Agreed!
It's quite easy actually to speak properly parsing Lojban. Most of
the time it's entirely habitual, not so much using your understanding
of the grammar directly, but rather pattern-recognizing a wide variety
of familiar conventional forms. It's only rarely that you produce or
encounter a sentence shape that dips into the complexities of the
grammar to find something new.
For instance I'm reminded of my recent joy at the phrase "lo melbi ko
li'i cerni" (have a beautiful morning, or literally, be the
experiencer of a beautiful experience of a morning). Joy because of
the *rareness* of that, of being hit by something in Lojban which I
still had to think twice in order to parse!
But of course if I hear now "xu lo xlali do li'i zgike" (are you not
enjoying the music, or literally, are you the experiencer of a bad
experience of music) or "lo milxe ko'a ti'e li'i lenku" (ko'a said
it's only a little cold, or literally, ko'a is, I hear, the
experiencer of a mild experience of cold), it doesn't make me feel
quite the same way again. The fresh joy is spent-- I've added that
form to my repertoire as one that I can hear and use without effort.
And Rosta
> On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 03:15:11AM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>> Probably the most fundamentally unnatural and perhaps even
>> 'uncognizable' part of Lojban is the formal grammar. The
>> structures of the formal grammar are nothing like those found in
>> natural languages. And I rather doubt whether anybody does or can
>> internalize the formal grammar as part of learning and using
>> Lojban;
>
> When I'm in practice, my statements pass the formal parser (mine,
> not the official on) on the order of 95 times out of a hundred. I'd
> wager real money on that.
>
> Certainly 8 or 9 out of 10 is true for all the serious speakers on
> IRC.
>
> I'm really not sure what you're on about here.
I don't doubt that the great majority of expert Lojban speakers' utterances are passed as licit by the formal parser. But I do doubt that the licitness of those utterances is due to the Lojban speaker having internalized the formal grammar and making active use of it during sentence processing.
I wager that syntactic structures that would be assigned to Lojban sentences by (1) syntacticians and (2) Lojban speakers would differ very substantially from the syntactic structures assigned by the formal grammar. This is partly because the trees (structures) generated by the formal grammar are very unlike anything found in human language, and partly because human language syntax is the interface with semantic interpretation, and the formal Lojban syntax isn't.
The situation is rather as though human speakers when faced with an impossibly inhuman grammar construct internally an entirely new, human language with approximately equivalent weak generative capacity (i.e. gives thumbs up and down to the same candidate sentences as the formal grammar does).
--And.
Oren
"Let usage decide" has a really good interpretation: base arguments
off of significant evidence.
tijlan
On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:08, John E Clifford <kali9...@yahoo.com> wrote:It might be useful to list the ways in which Lojban fails to meet human language standards. I personally can't think of one (even xorlo has, alas, human analogs). Remember that at least one school of linguists think that all sentences in any natural language are merely transforms of predicate logic sentences, with minor loss of information.Oops. In theory iirc Lojban can require processing depths that no human language in fact has (though I am not sure that there is a theory that says they can't have it) and some parts of Lojban do require keeping in mind the details of the developing sentence structure which again exceed the need in natural languages (again only in fact perhaps).(Quoting from two different emails for convenience...)I am, very very fortunate not be part of the school of linguistics that believes in silly things like transformations (nor Russel's teapot). When I say that Lojban violates things that human languages do, I'm not appealing in any sense to "Universal Grammar;" I'm simply say that, when you look at the languages of the world (henceforth, "languages"), certain things happen and certain things don't. Maybe they CAN, but the fact that they don't is pretty telling about human brains process speech.
It reminds me of this article:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/roots-of-langua/
English, Russian, Finnish, Chinese, Swahili, and many others belong to the SVO type, so one could think it's telling about a certain 'natural' sentence structure at least for the native speakers of these languages. But it turns out that those speakers tend to find SOV more natural despite how they register the verb arguments in their natlangs' real usage. And your point still holds, since the actual majority (75%) of the world's languages are SOV.
I see two, maybe three, areas where there is a problem from a linguistic perspective. The first is that languages do not have verbs with more than four unmarked slots for a predicate, and there are VERY few that have four; the vast majority of verbs in the vast majority of languages have three or less. If you get more than four, you ALWAYS have some sort of marking (most often as an oblique phrase; i.e., a preposition or a postposition)) that indicates how the additional argument relates to the predicate. Yet, Lojban has gismu which take more than four arguments. If it were testable, I would put a LOT of money the fact that, after Lojban was released into the wild, you could do a text count and find that predicates rarely, if ever, have more than three arguments in them, and that the three arguments pretty much always had the three closest to the gismu.
I agree.
The second problem (or second half of this first problem) is that some of the gismu seem to have tons of extra stuff in them that is not something that would be included in the meaning of a word in any language. "Bucket," for example, contains a predicate slot for the material the bucket is made from. This, as far as I could tell, was thrown in to make the gismu have more slots. The material a bucket is made of has far less to do with bucketness than, say, all of the things in klama have to do with going. And why does "bucket" have it and not, say, "bird"? I can call something that isn't a living bird (say, a drawing of a bird), but why doesn't it a gismu slot to indicate it's material? If buckets get a slot for material, so should everything.
Again I agree. I would prefer "ti baktu ma'e lo slasi" to "ti baktu fi lo slasi" (although I would further like "ti slasi baktu" than "ti baktu ma'e lo slasi" in most cases).
mu'o mi'e tijlan
tijlan
Actually I can
quite easily understand sentences like "la .bastyn. se klama mi fu lo
karce" (I went to Boston in the car.) or "ma xe fanva fi lo glibau"
(What's a translation into English?), either written or spoken, as
well as producing them fluently.
To me, "ma xe fanva fi lo glibau" seems slightly easier than "la .bastyn. se klama mi fu lo karce", because I feel I can memorise "xe fanva fi" as a neat unit, whereas "se klama (fa) ... fu" appears as less than a neat unit.
mi'e la tijlan
mu'o
Kevin Reid
> I wager that syntactic structures that would be assigned to Lojban
> sentences by (1) syntacticians and (2) Lojban speakers would differ
> very substantially from the syntactic structures assigned by the
> formal grammar.
[Disclaimer: I Am Not A Linguist.]
In my experience developing software which works with the results of
parsing using formal grammar (well, the PEG version), the trees
produced by the formal grammar are not like how I internally think of
Lojban grammar, but insofar as they are, *they aren't what I would
design as a formal AST for Lojban either*.
In particular, the trees have a huge number of nodes which pertain
only to the implementation structure of the grammar and are both
redundant and unrelated to the semantics of Lojban. This falls out
from the fact that the parser produces one tree node per nonterminal,
named according to that nonterminal, unconditionally: no appropriate
specialized actions/transformations have been defined.
There are two major problems with the usefulness of the produced parse
trees:
1. There are many nodes with exactly one child which reflect rules
that
exist only due to the factoring of the grammar, or nested cases
in order
to produce the proper parse tree for various optional clauses
which
usually don't exist.
2. The nodes are named according to the nonterminal, not according
to the
matched rule. This means that the names reflect the syntactic
role, the
slot it fills, rather than what the slot was filled with. The
result of
this is that an interpretation of a given subtree has be
inferred from
the number and kind of child nodes rather than an actual symbol
in the
tree.
Particularly, note that the second problem is because the information
*simply does not exist* in a formal system. The formal grammar(s) we
have are simply defined to accept/reject sentences; the information
about "what are these particular alternatives called" exists only
informally in the CLL and other semantic-description documents.
So:
I agree that the formal grammar produces weird structures.
However, I believe it would be possible to create a parser, or
transform the output of the current parser(s), such that the structure
*is* similar to what a syntactician, or a Lojban speaker who is
familiar with parsers and formal grammars (such as for programming
languages), would assign.
Furthermore, I believe this particular project *should* be done, as it
would (a) aid the development of computer software which interprets
Lojban, and (b) be a useful tool in discussing “what does this Lojban
sentence mean” and making sure that the semantics of Lojban are fully
defined.
--
Kevin Reid <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>
And Rosta
Very well put, much better than I could have done.
> So:
>
> I agree that the formal grammar produces weird structures.
>
> However, I believe it would be possible to create a parser, or transform
> the output of the current parser(s), such that the structure *is*
> similar to what a syntactician, or a Lojban speaker who is familiar with
> parsers and formal grammars (such as for programming languages), would
> assign.
I agree, at least if it is enough to do it on a rough-and-ready basis. Indeed, I once had an undergraduate do a dissertation with me on precisely this exercise. (Which in fact is where I first beheld the full horrors of Lojban parses in tree form.)
> Furthermore, I believe this particular project *should* be done, as it
> would (a) aid the development of computer software which interprets
> Lojban, and (b) be a useful tool in discussing �what does this Lojban
> sentence mean� and making sure that the semantics of Lojban are fully
> defined.
I agree, in an ideal world, but it's not a simple job. Needs a (possibly amateur) syntactician with plenty of free time. Would that be you?
---And.
Luke Bergen
> li'i cerni" (have a beautiful morning, or literally, be the
> experiencer of a beautiful experience of a morning).
Jorge Llambías
> ta'o
>> "lo melbi ko
>> li'i cerni" (have a beautiful morning, or literally, be the
>> experiencer of a beautiful experience of a morning).
>
> I'm having a little trouble parsing this myself. Let's see. {lo melbi ko
> li'i cerni} -> {lo melbi ku cu li'i cerni ko} ?
>
> Could someone with a bit more knowledge break it down correctly for me?
{lo melbi (ku) cu li'i cerni (vau) kei ko (vau)}
You can't elide "kei" if you put "ko" at the end.
> How
> many sumti are there, which chunk is the selbri (if any), etc...
"li'i cerni (vau) (kei)" is the selbri, "lo melbi (ku)" and "ko" are
its two sumti.
Remember that "NU .... (KEI)" converts a bridi, in this case the bridi
"(zo'e) cerni (zo'e) (zo'e) (vau)" into the selbri: "li'i (zo'e) cerni
(zo'e) (zo'e) (vau) (kei)".
Luke Bergen
--
Jorge Llambías
> hmm, so I parsed it correctly then?
You only forgot the "kei".
> So how does that translate into "be
> the experiencer of a good morning"? The x2 of {cerni} (ko in the sentence)
No, the x2 of "cerni" was left empty.
> is the day of which the morning is. So wouldn't..... oh, nevermind, I just
> got it. The {li'i} would make the x2 into the experiencer or something.
Right, "ko" is not filling the x2 of "cerni", it is filling the x2 of
"li'i zo'e cerni zo'e zo'e kei", a different predicate.
Minimiscience
> > "lo melbi ko
> > li'i cerni" (have a beautiful morning, or literally, be the
> > experiencer of a beautiful experience of a morning).
>
> I'm having a little trouble parsing this myself. Let's see. {lo melbi ko
> li'i cerni} -> {lo melbi ku cu li'i cerni ko} ?
>
> Could someone with a bit more knowledge break it down correctly for me? How
> many sumti are there, which chunk is the selbri (if any), etc...
> Thanks.
It's "{lo melbi [ku] cu li'i cerni [vau kei] ko [vau]}." The key thing to note
here is that "{li'i}" belongs to {selma'o} NU, and so it converts a {bridi} (in
this case just "{cerni}") into a {selbri} with the place structure "x1 is x2's
experience of [bridi]." Thus, "{lo melbi ko li'i cerni}" translates as "A
beautiful thing is your (imperative) experience of morning" or "Have/experience
a beautiful morning."
mu'omi'e .kamymecraijun.
--
do ganai ka'e tcidu dei gi djuno lo dukse
Alan Post
Kevin,
Thank you for this.
I was writing C code for many years before I began to study the
grammar, and my experience of learning the formal grammar for C
was one of joy--I saw the language in an entirely new way and I
think it made me a better programmer.
I've struggled understanding the formal grammar for Lojban, and
I've assumed it was my inexperience as a whole with the language.
I certainly plan for some part of my future study of Lojban to
include a more rigorous understanding of the formal grammar, but
your hints hear really speak to why the technique I've used so
far to understand it has been difficult.
And +1 on your suggestion of transforming the grammar into something
that would be easier to write software for interpretation. I can
peform my future study with an eye toward this as well.
Thank you!
-Alan
--
te djuno lo do sevzi
Robert LeChevalier
> And +1 on your suggestion of transforming the grammar into something
> that would be easier to write software for interpretation. I can
> peform my future study with an eye toward this as well.
I'm not one of them, but some people find the E-BNF to be much more
"natural" for them than the formal YACC grammar.
lojbab