Why Lojban fails

[John E Clifford]

This seems like a good time for the sorta annual reminder thaat Lojban as currently constituted is doomed to fail of its intended goals.  The reason is simply that it is built upside down, so the proofs all have to run up hill.  This pattern was set by JCB on day one, when he decided to work by adding logic to a speakable langauge (English), rather than extracting a speakable language from loigc (not FOPL, the then favorite, but, as should have been obvious already in the early days of Loglan, what is now called Higher Order Intensional Logic (HOIL)).  We know this can be done because it is a given in (certain, e.g. Montague’s) linguistic theories that that is how languages actually come about.

Ordinary languages derive sentences from formulae (as it were) by a variety of transformation in a variety of orders, with the result that a given senence may be traceable back through various histories to very different original formuale, amphiboly.  The task of constructing a Loglan, then, is to find a set of transformations and ordering rules which is at every step unique, such that, at each step, the products involved are traceable back to a single form in each case.  In tthis way, the monoparsing of the original formula is inherited by the final sentence.  Working the other way, the best to be hoped for is successive approximations to the goal but nevr a guarantee that you have actually succeeded (even if you have).  

By now, if yoou have been paying attention as you went along, you should know wnough about HOIL (however you think about it) and about transformation and order rules to have a good start of a right side up project.  Turning your attention to that would be a much better use of your time than correcting minor footnotes in CLL.2 or whatever.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Alchemists pursued what appeared to be nonexistent. Still they found a lot of gems during their research.

So whatever goals Loglan or Lojban had in past it's fine in present as it is.

[uakci]

I would’ve agreed, but neither logic nor linguistics are alchemy. Lojban has succeeded as a language that people use to communicate, but as a project, it fails to meet the requirements as it stands now. From a bird’s-eye view, this might not be so apparent, but then you realize that so many little things are left undecided, like {ce’u} filling, exact semantics of FIhO, some grammatical quirks like {.y bu} and {zo .y}, and the ever-present issue of overengineering…

You could say that this is not a problem for Lojban, and I’d agree: not for Lojban as a language (or languages, since Lojban dialects tend to solve these matters more elegantly and therefore amount to an advancement, not a hindrance). But the overall project’s criteria have not yet been met, and thus it is still ongoing, which raises the question of why one should care to believe in its completion provided that it’s over 30 years since it was founded. I, for one, prefer to stake my bets on a loglang project whose development history — track record — and leadership do not foretell its eventual abandonment.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 19:54, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Alchemists pursued what appeared to be nonexistent. Still they found a lot of gems during their research.

So whatever goals Loglan or Lojban had in past it's fine in present as it is.

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em sábado, 11 de abril de 2020 21:39:56 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

I would’ve agreed, but neither logic nor linguistics are alchemy.

But spoken fopl or swh might be.

(Controlled parsable semantically unambiguous English is a thing anyway and is in use unlike Lojban)

 

Lojban has succeeded as a language that people use to communicate, but as a project, it fails to meet the requirements as it stands now. From a bird’s-eye view, this might not be so apparent, but then you realize that so many little things are left undecided, like {ce’u} filling, exact semantics of FIhO, some grammatical quirks like {.y bu} and {zo .y}, and the ever-present issue of overengineering…

You could say that this is not a problem for Lojban, and I’d agree: not for Lojban as a language (or languages, since Lojban dialects tend to solve these matters more elegantly and therefore amount to an advancement, not a hindrance). But the overall project’s criteria have not yet been met, and thus it is still ongoing, which raises the question of why one should care to believe in its completion provided that it’s over 30 years since it was founded. I, for one, prefer to stake my bets on a loglang project whose development history — track record — and leadership do not foretell its eventual abandonment.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 19:54, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Alchemists pursued what appeared to be nonexistent. Still they found a lot of gems during their research.

So whatever goals Loglan or Lojban had in past it's fine in present as it is.

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[Mike S.]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 12:29 PM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

This seems like a good time for the sorta annual reminder thaat Lojban as currently constituted is doomed to fail of its intended goals.  The reason is simply that it is built upside down, so the proofs all have to run up hill.  This pattern was set by JCB on day one, when he decided to work by adding logic to a speakable langauge (English), rather than extracting a speakable language from loigc (not FOPL, the then favorite, but, as should have been obvious already in the early days of Loglan, what is now called Higher Order Intensional Logic (HOIL)).  We know this can be done because it is a given in (certain, e.g. Montague’s) linguistic theories that that is how languages actually come about.

I agree that Montague's work is worth a look, but it's hardly fair to fault JCB on that point.  JCB developed Loglan between 1955 and 1960 and Montague's work was not published until about a decade later.  In fact, due partially to Montague's premature death, and partially to the baroqueness of the formalisms Montague employed in his terse papers, Montague semantics (and what became formal semantics) did not become well known and understood for yet another decade after that.  So to criticize JCB on that point is more than a little anachronistic.

(By the way, sir, forgive me for saying this: Given the timeline and given the fact that JCB was not a logician, it has always seemed to me that if *anyone* was in a good position to incorporate Montague's work into the development Loglan/Lojban, it was plainly you!)

Since we're on the topic, I will add that, in my opinion, Montague semantics in its original form would not really have been a silver bullet for the semantic issues and debates that have cropped up over the years on the Jboske list and elsewhere.  Montague had no inkling of either mereology or plural logic, and seems to have bought into Russell's quantificational analysis of definite articles (which I think is much more aptly modeled as a Hilbert-type choice function, but I won't get into here).  There is also inherent in Montague's work a deeply problematic conflation between genericity and intensions, and correspondingly between specificity and extensions (which I also won't get into here).  The point is: the Great Gadri Debates probably would have happened anyway, simply because the issues themselves are tricky.

To be clear:  This of course is all 100% Monday-morning quarterbacking on my part.  I consider Montague as something of a genius, and I rank his contributions to the field of loglanging as being in the top five, if not top three of all contributions.  But the point is that Montague's papers were not destined to save Lojban from semantic confusion even if they had been known about, which they weren't.

In summary, I'll say it seems pretty obvious to me that Lojban/Loglan does not do a very good job of being a loglang -- but it's only by *modern standards* I say that.  Considering that JCB was (if I recall correctly) a psychologist working (as far as I know) all by himself  from 1955 to 1960 with little training in either linguistics or logic, I actually consider Loglan pretty good from that perspective. It is most likely better than I could have dreamt up or built if I had been alive at the same time.  So JCB takes his place as a bright star in the constellation of loglang history, regardless of whether his language fails or not to be a good loglang.

-Mike

[uakci]

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 22:12, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Em sábado, 11 de abril de 2020 21:39:56 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

I would’ve agreed, but neither logic nor linguistics are alchemy.

But spoken fopl or swh might be.

(Controlled parsable semantically unambiguous English is a thing anyway and is in use unlike Lojban)

But a well-defined project with a well-defined charter is not. Projects are endowed with goals primarily to be able to assess their degree of completion easily; so, you can look at Lojban and the goals that we’ve set for it and say that the project is incomplete.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

 

Lojban has succeeded as a language that people use to communicate, but as a project, it fails to meet the requirements as it stands now. From a bird’s-eye view, this might not be so apparent, but then you realize that so many little things are left undecided, like {ce’u} filling, exact semantics of FIhO, some grammatical quirks like {.y bu} and {zo .y}, and the ever-present issue of overengineering…

You could say that this is not a problem for Lojban, and I’d agree: not for Lojban as a language (or languages, since Lojban dialects tend to solve these matters more elegantly and therefore amount to an advancement, not a hindrance). But the overall project’s criteria have not yet been met, and thus it is still ongoing, which raises the question of why one should care to believe in its completion provided that it’s over 30 years since it was founded. I, for one, prefer to stake my bets on a loglang project whose development history — track record — and leadership do not foretell its eventual abandonment.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 19:54, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Alchemists pursued what appeared to be nonexistent. Still they found a lot of gems during their research.

So whatever goals Loglan or Lojban had in past it's fine in present as it is.

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

I wouldn't say it's incomplete. I would just say it failed to meet its goals.

And nevertheless the project lives on and the interest in it is non zero despite all its failures which don't seem to bother fluent speakers a lot.

[John E Clifford]

I wasn’t faulting the founders and early workers, only pointing to the futility of continuing at the present.  Things beyond FOPL were just not thought about even in graduate classes in the 50s and 60s, though they did take off rather rapidly then (I went to my first Monatague Conference in 1973 or so, with all the hot shots present and talking above everyone’s heads).  Some  minor points:  Montague’s quantification paper came out in 1960 or 61.  He did know mereology, courtesy of Twardowsky, but didn’t see its relevance.  He was a Tarski student, which put some limits on him (an antipathy for Quine, for exampe -- another possible source of mereology)

As I think (hope) I said, it may turn out that some Loglan will be right, it is just that it will. be impossible to prove it so by the present system.  JCB, by the way, knew more logic than Lojbab (and got better grades, too), so we don’t want to be casting that as an excuse for a bad job at what he was doing.  He just was a terrible experimental designer, though he did well in social psychology. 

Yeah, it took me a long time to figure out how Montague (et al) ought to fit into this scheme.  I got caught up in the project and am bad at adding one and one. (I actually don’t think that Montague’s system itself is too relevant; it is the overall pattern that counts and that is largel Chomsky, which was available to JCB from early on.) 

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.

[uakci]

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 22:45, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wouldn't say it's incomplete. I would just say it failed to meet its goals.

Well, then that makes it a complete failure. :P

And nevertheless the project lives on and the interest in it is non zero despite all its failures which don't seem to bother fluent speakers a lot.

I’m a fluent speaker and I’m bothered. And I know many Lojbanists (most of which prefer to stay out of this community to preserve their sanity) who are bothered too.

— Mi Hoashi etc.

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 00:24:22 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 22:45, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wouldn't say it's incomplete. I would just say it failed to meet its goals.

Well, then that makes it a complete failure. :P

And nevertheless the project lives on and the interest in it is non zero despite all its failures which don't seem to bother fluent speakers a lot.

I’m a fluent speaker and I’m bothered.

I mean if you are fluent you can't be bothered or else you are not fluent.

If the language works there is no problem.

Unless this is not what one was intending it to work.

 

And I know many Lojbanists (most of which prefer to stay out of this community to preserve their sanity) who are bothered too.

— Mi Hoashi etc.

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[uakci]

sob., 11 kwi 2020 o 23:45 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 00:24:22 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 22:45, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wouldn't say it's incomplete. I would just say it failed to meet its goals.

Well, then that makes it a complete failure. :P

And nevertheless the project lives on and the interest in it is non zero despite all its failures which don't seem to bother fluent speakers a lot.

I’m a fluent speaker and I’m bothered.

I mean if you are fluent you can't be bothered or else you are not fluent.

Perhaps we're talking about different senses of the word 'bothered'. I'm not bothered because I speak a dialect which works around these issues. I could use the fossilized official dialect, but I'd risk many, many moments of frustration and encumberment.

 

If the language works there is no problem.

It doesn't really work that well, so there is a problem.

Unless this is not what one was intending it to work.

I'm not sure I grok this sentence. As I've said before, there's the issue of overengineering. Sure, I can speak the bloated variants of Lojban, but why should I if there are better solutions at reach? (Zantufa, Toaq, Xorban are all examples of great non-overengineered work.)

And since Lojban is 35 years old and itself heavily borrowing from a 65-year-old language, it might be time to *remove* rather than *amend*. One example: solpahi's connective system works just as well as the current one — which may have had to be this way due to YACC's limitations — but offers less bloat. So if we want simplicity and straightforwardness, why don't we choose simplicity and straightforwardness if, again, it's within arm's reach?

— Mỉ Hỏashĩ jí ka.

 

 

And I know many Lojbanists (most of which prefer to stay out of this community to preserve their sanity) who are bothered too.

— Mi Hoashi etc.

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[Mike S.]

Just a couple more random points...

On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 5:09 PM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I wasn’t faulting the founders and early workers, only pointing to the futility of continuing at the present.  Things beyond FOPL were just not thought about even in graduate classes in the 50s and 60s, though they did take off rather rapidly then (I went to my first Monatague Conference in 1973 or so, with all the hot shots present and talking above everyone’s heads).

If you were there in 1973, I envy you.  You witnessed history.
 

 Some  minor points:  Montague’s quantification paper came out in 1960 or 61.

Sorry, sir, but I believe you're off by 10 years.  His first two big papers introducing his system of analyzing a "fragment" of English as if it were a formal language came out in 1970, and his most famous paper Proper Treatment of Quantification in English was published in 1973 posthumously.  Montague had earlier papers, but they were on (I believe) set theory and not related to his "grammar" (really semantics).  And as you yourself point out, even in 1973 it was a small closed club of people who actually understood what he was talking about.  The earliest Montague paper dealing with language was 67/68 I believe, but it's been overshadowed by the more famous three that came out later.

 

 He did know mereology, courtesy of Twardowsky, but didn’t see its relevance.  

I am sure Montague was aware of mereology, but it does not figure into his system.  I can look up the dates, but I also believe plural logic was not even on the scene prior to 1973 (Boolos(??)). Interestingly, Barbara Partee has been deciphering Montague's private notes (written in a private shorthand) and she reports that Montague was privately flummoxed by the logic of some sentence in English involving plurals.  As a person who has read the Jboske archives, that made me smile.  If he had lived and wrote the book that he was planning on writing (which would have been a classic and which we've been robbed of by fate, in my estimation) I believe Montague would have been forced to deal with plurals (and masses), just as jboskepre were so forced.

 

He was a Tarski student, which put some limits on him (an antipathy for Quine, for exampe -- another possible source of mereology)

Quine was a foundations-of-math guy, and his famous disdain for intensional/modal logic is fine for a certain approach towards math, but it's completely inapt when applied to human language.  We talking humans use intensions constantly; they need to be handled like they're real values for expressions.  In other words, nonexistent things are part of the model; nonexistent things absolutely do figure into the value of words -- even if one has qualms about their existence. (Actually, one should have ontological qualms -- that's the whole point -- but semantic qualms are impractical.)  Quine himself remarked upon his review of Loglan that he thought that human language was too messy to be logical and therefore, though Loglan was interesting to him, he thought it was hopeless.  Mind you for Quine "logic" by definition excluded modal logic. I can dig up Quine's exact quote on Loglan if you're interested (not the one JCB circulated).

In short I don't know why Quine has had the influence he has had on Loglan/Lojban.  His idea of logic was far too austere to be used as a basis for human logical language. Kripke's work is much closer to the mark, and it was Montague who noticed this and showed how modal logic could be used to (directly) analyze English. 

As I think (hope) I said, it may turn out that some Loglan will be right, it is just that it will. be impossible to prove it so by the present system.  JCB, by the way, knew more logic than Lojbab (and got better grades, too), so we don’t want to be casting that as an excuse for a bad job at what he was doing.  He just was a terrible experimental designer, though he did well in social psychology. 

Yeah, it took me a long time to figure out how Montague (et al) ought to fit into this scheme.  I got caught up in the project and am bad at adding one and one. (I actually don’t think that Montague’s system itself is too relevant; it is the overall pattern that counts and that is largel Chomsky, which was available to JCB from early on.) 

If someone was enterprising enough, they could write _Proper Treatment of Quantification in Lojban_.  Any takers?

-Mike

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 00:56:42 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

sob., 11 kwi 2020 o 23:45 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 00:24:22 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

On Sat, 11 Apr 2020 at 22:45, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

I wouldn't say it's incomplete. I would just say it failed to meet its goals.

Well, then that makes it a complete failure. :P

And nevertheless the project lives on and the interest in it is non zero despite all its failures which don't seem to bother fluent speakers a lot.

I’m a fluent speaker and I’m bothered.

I mean if you are fluent you can't be bothered or else you are not fluent.

Perhaps we're talking about different senses of the word 'bothered'. I'm not bothered because I speak a dialect which works around these issues. I could use the fossilized official dialect, but I'd risk many, many moments of frustration and encumberment.

 

If the language works there is no problem.

It doesn't really work that well, so there is a problem.

If the thing is speakable then it works.

 

Unless this is not what one was intending it to work.

I'm not sure I grok this sentence. As I've said before, there's the issue of overengineering. Sure, I can speak the bloated variants of Lojban, but why should I if there are better solutions at reach? (Zantufa, Toaq, Xorban are all examples of great non-overengineered work.)

Some person may say: the first Hilbert operator is bi'u, the second one is lo'o'o'o'o'u and then another person would come and say: no, you misread Hilbert so that's how I think it should work and hereby I propose lo'o'o'o'ou

I don't know what is better here and who are the judges.

Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

And since Lojban is 35 years old and itself heavily borrowing from a 65-year-old language, it might be time to *remove* rather than *amend*. One example: solpahi's connective system works just as well as the current one — which may have had to be this way due to YACC's limitations — but offers less bloat.

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

So if we want simplicity

Then we should speak English. Or toki pona (depending on the meaning of the word "simple")

 

and straightforwardness, why don't we choose simplicity and straightforwardness if, again, it's within arm's reach?

Because there are also aspiring students within arm's reach.

You learned something, good to you.

Now create a copy of the database and test your crud operations on it so that new learners can have python2 final version now and forever.

— Mỉ Hỏashĩ jí ka.

 

 

And I know many Lojbanists (most of which prefer to stay out of this community to preserve their sanity) who are bothered too.

— Mi Hoashi etc.

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[uakci]

(snip)

It doesn't really work that well, so there is a problem.

If the thing is speakable then it works.

But do we want to go with the bare minimum? Since we've already got it, why not advance?

 

Unless this is not what one was intending it to work.

I'm not sure I grok this sentence. As I've said before, there's the issue of overengineering. Sure, I can speak the bloated variants of Lojban, but why should I if there are better solutions at reach? (Zantufa, Toaq, Xorban are all examples of great non-overengineered work.)

Some person may say: the first Hilbert operator is bi'u, the second one is lo'o'o'o'o'u and then another person would come and say: no, you misread Hilbert so that's how I think it should work and hereby I propose lo'o'o'o'ou

I don't know what is better here and who are the judges.

Time is the perfect judge. The Loglandic adage ‘Usage will decide’ shows this very well: some features surface and some sink to the bottom. But because of things like the Big Freeze and the covert stigmatization of deviations from the official dialect that still lasts, there's no room for that happening. Instead, those who have the good ideas have to restrict themselves to using them in their private circles because any attempt at bringing them into the official language are met with dissent and dismay.

 

Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

Latin, too, is a stable language. But it's been long abandoned, for Romance languages had sprung about. The only reason some people learn Latin is for academic purposes, since it has a great share in the body of scientific works our world has produced.

Do you think Lojban deserves the sort of treatment that languages we already know are quite dead get?

 

And since Lojban is 35 years old and itself heavily borrowing from a 65-year-old language, it might be time to *remove* rather than *amend*. One example: solpahi's connective system works just as well as the current one — which may have had to be this way due to YACC's limitations — but offers less bloat.

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

Languages change regardless of backward compatibility. No solution is truly future-proof; the only approach that guarantees success is to embrace change. Dismissing change on grounds of there being change in the first place is, in my opinion, hilariously wrong — then if you're so passionate about keeping the language in its current form, why not declare it to be a success and, most importantly, move on to more important things in our lives?

 

So if we want simplicity

Then we should speak English. Or toki pona (depending on the meaning of the word "simple")

English is far from simple, as you might have learned.

Please don't just derail the conversation like that. We're talking about improving Lojban, not replacing it with Toki Pona or Georgian.

 

 

and straightforwardness, why don't we choose simplicity and straightforwardness if, again, it's within arm's reach?

Because there are also aspiring students within arm's reach.

The aspiring students who are within arm's reach don't know what they're setting themselves up for.

If I'd known I'd be joining a community like the one we have which gives the language in its current form this much phrase, I'd never have taken up the offer.

 

You learned something, good to you.

Please leave the condescending comments on your side of the screen.

 

Now create a copy of the database and test your crud operations on it so that new learners can have python2 final version now and forever.

Isn't that… like… the opposite of what I want and the exact statement of what you want?

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 01:53:05 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

(snip)

It doesn't really work that well, so there is a problem.

If the thing is speakable then it works.

But do we want to go with the bare minimum? Since we've already got it, why not advance?

 

Unless this is not what one was intending it to work.

I'm not sure I grok this sentence. As I've said before, there's the issue of overengineering. Sure, I can speak the bloated variants of Lojban, but why should I if there are better solutions at reach? (Zantufa, Toaq, Xorban are all examples of great non-overengineered work.)

Some person may say: the first Hilbert operator is bi'u, the second one is lo'o'o'o'o'u and then another person would come and say: no, you misread Hilbert so that's how I think it should work and hereby I propose lo'o'o'o'ou

I don't know what is better here and who are the judges.

Time is the perfect judge. The Loglandic adage ‘Usage will decide’ shows this very well: some features surface and some sink to the bottom. But because of things like the Big Freeze and the covert stigmatization of deviations from the official dialect that still lasts, there's no room for that happening. Instead, those who have the good ideas have to restrict themselves to using them in their private circles because any attempt at bringing them into the official language are met with dissent and dismay.

 

Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

Latin, too, is a stable language. But it's been long abandoned, for Romance languages had sprung about. The only reason some people learn Latin is for academic purposes, since it has a great share in the body of scientific works our world has produced.

Latin is a live language  btw.

As the CLL puts it creation of new words is encouraged.

Do you think Lojban deserves the sort of treatment that languages we already know are quite dead get?

 

And since Lojban is 35 years old and itself heavily borrowing from a 65-year-old language, it might be time to *remove* rather than *amend*. One example: solpahi's connective system works just as well as the current one — which may have had to be this way due to YACC's limitations — but offers less bloat.

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

Languages change regardless of backward compatibility. No solution is truly future-proof; the only approach that guarantees success is to embrace change. Dismissing change on grounds of there being change in the first place is, in my opinion, hilariously wrong — then if you're so passionate about keeping the language in its current form, why not declare it to be a success and, most importantly, move on to more important things in our lives?

I don't consider any notion of "success" for Lojban as being important. No teleology sorry.

 

So if we want simplicity

Then we should speak English. Or toki pona (depending on the meaning of the word "simple")

English is far from simple, as you might have learned.

Please don't just derail the conversation like that. We're talking about improving Lojban, not replacing it with Toki Pona or Georgian.

 

 

and straightforwardness, why don't we choose simplicity and straightforwardness if, again, it's within arm's reach?

Because there are also aspiring students within arm's reach.

The aspiring students who are within arm's reach don't know what they're setting themselves up for.

If I'd known I'd be joining a community like the one we have which gives the language in its current form this much phrase, I'd never have taken up the offer.

 

You learned something, good to you.

Please leave the condescending comments on your side of the screen.

 

Now create a copy of the database and test your crud operations on it so that new learners can have python2 final version now and forever.

Isn't that… like… the opposite of what I want and the exact statement of what you want?

Sure. You are trying to change and change and change the language so that new learners will never catch up 

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[uakci]

(snip)

Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

Latin, too, is a stable language. But it's been long abandoned, for Romance languages had sprung about. The only reason some people learn Latin is for academic purposes, since it has a great share in the body of scientific works our world has produced.

Latin is a live language  btw.

As the CLL puts it creation of new words is encouraged.

(see (1))

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

Languages change regardless of backward compatibility. No solution is truly future-proof; the only approach that guarantees success is to embrace change. Dismissing change on grounds of there being change in the first place is, in my opinion, hilariously wrong — then if you're so passionate about keeping the language in its current form, why not declare it to be a success and, most importantly, move on to more important things in our lives?

I don't consider any notion of "success" for Lojban as being important. No teleology sorry.

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

> > Isn't that… like… the opposite of what I want and the exact statement of what you want?

Sure. You are trying to change and change and change the language so that new learners will never catch up 

(ad (1))

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with. However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

Also, Dotside.

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry. I already had been pretty lifeless until recently, and that phase, I think, had managed to last for a couple years. ‘Impressive’, huh? I see that it must be either dead air or vain debates (or rather: debacles) about what Lojban should and shouldn’t be. 

Instead of just using it, as one does.

— Mi Hoashi jí ka.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 12:30:07 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

(snip)

Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

Latin, too, is a stable language. But it's been long abandoned, for Romance languages had sprung about. The only reason some people learn Latin is for academic purposes, since it has a great share in the body of scientific works our world has produced.

Latin is a live language  btw.

As the CLL puts it creation of new words is encouraged.

(see (1))

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

Languages change regardless of backward compatibility. No solution is truly future-proof; the only approach that guarantees success is to embrace change. Dismissing change on grounds of there being change in the first place is, in my opinion, hilariously wrong — then if you're so passionate about keeping the language in its current form, why not declare it to be a success and, most importantly, move on to more important things in our lives?

I don't consider any notion of "success" for Lojban as being important. No teleology sorry.

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.

So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance. 

> > Isn't that… like… the opposite of what I want and the exact statement of what you want?

Sure. You are trying to change and change and change the language so that new learners will never catch up 

(ad (1))

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.

That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.

Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.

I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.

As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.

 

However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

What I think is of little importance too.

I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.

If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).

Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.

However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose  those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

English is not prescriptive.

 

Also, Dotside.

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

That's fine. They can leave. Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.

And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.

 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.

You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.

[MorphemeAddict]

Where can I find out more about these other dialects of Lojban and the supposed problems and their solutions? 

stevo

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[John E Clifford]

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.  

My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”  In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal.  But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder.  Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable. But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.  

If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents.  The winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret.  Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!).  Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there. What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join?  Nothing, really.  So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).

I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least).  And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar.  After all, I am in the middle of it.  

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.

[uakci]

niedz., 12 kwi 2020 o 13:02 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.

So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance. 

Sounds oxymoronic to me.

 

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.

That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.

They will also be ready for the inevitable, which is that there are commonly used grammatical structures which the CLL wilfully omits.

 

Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.

 

*Your* community.

And it's time I made a small correction. It's been a great mistake to call you a community. Communities stick together, but this make-pretend community is entrenched in disputes. The departure of a great member of a community typically comes off as worthy of grievance, but this community has seen giants go. Communities aren't the sort of places that come and go; you come and stay. Communities are something people contribute to through willpower and effort and their precious man-hours (and woman-hours too), but the only experience I've seen radiate from those who've tried and failed to incorporate themselves in the Lojbanic 'community' is one that's based on full-on unreciprocation. In a well-functioning community, people leave when they think they've done their dues; in a pathological community like this one, people leave because there's so much work to do that they're barred from doing.

 

I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.

Sure, spend effort on what matters least. Just to keep the *air* of business.

 

As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.

So you've jumped on the programming language train… oh boy do I have a lot to say in this matter.

Programming languages do improve. Java — a language that's close to relic status — has recently seen additions like lambdas, closures, anonymous classes… Every programming language which does not wish to be yanked off the mainstream train of thought tries its best to include the essential parts of what people want or need or can find in other places. We don't need to force people to use Functional Programming concepts, but we might as well leave those parts in so the ones who want it can have it and be happy.

Have you ever heard about Elm? It, too, is governed by a man who believes he can exercise absolute power. He, too, says things like ‘if you don't do X the Y way, then why are you using our product?’. All in the name of ‘being opinionated’. But we can be opinionated and permissive; we can foster diversity while maintaining a strong baseline; we can be descriptive without going all out. It can all be done, and the way strong Open Source projects are led can tell us a lot about what we're doing wrong. I predict that Elm is going to get forked away from very soon; Lojban, with its despotic attitude and little room for variation, is going to be moved away from. It's happening, and once it's reached full impetus, you won't be able to stop it.

 

 

However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

What I think is of little importance too.

You say that, but you're very strong in asserting your opinions. If you think you should bow to the Founding Fathers of the language and to the demigods which preside in the committee (whatever its form of presentation is), then you're doing this in vain. Language is to free thought, not enslave it.

 

I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.

I don't have a problem with treating CLL Lojban as ‘baseline’ Lojban. In fact, I wrote a little essay on the matter around two years ago [1], and although it's hard for me to gauge the reactions, I can tell you that calling the ‘official dialect’ the ‘base(line) dialect’ doesn't do said dialect any harm — quite the opposite: it empowers people who want to experiment to experiment, and gives this base dialect an incentive to develop — slowly and rationally.

 

If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).

See above. And the ‘tinkerers’ (as you've taken to calling them) aren't at fault; you're just getting a taste of your own medicine.

 

Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.

You know what makes learning harder? Tons upon tons of cmavo which nobody really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in gismu frames. Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs. ZEhA vs. FAhA vs. BAI. And if your point is that the CLL is a definitive source of knowledge about what Lojban 1.0 the forever version should look like, then what about xorlo? This starts to feel like I'm trying to persuade a biblical absolutism into rejecting the absoluteness of the Bible. And if that's the case, the best approach is to walk away and leave them be; many people have done that so far. It's a telling sign.

However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose  those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.

Python 3 was released in 2008, and the official deprecation date for Python 2 was announced to be 2020. Do you really think that 12 years isn't enough to hop over?

You're making a moot point: in Python 3, `print` is made into a regular function; previously, it was a keyword. This reduces complexity, which is good — it regularizes the treatment of `print` (what's so special about it? why can't my procedure be made into a keyword?). The Python community has encouraged switching over to v3 for a long time, yielding such tools as 2to3.

All this shows that change can be allowed, even if you prefer to keep it slow. Today's language leaders' standpoint is not to attempt any change, even as it wheezes past them.

 

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

English is not prescriptive.

Languages themselves can't be descriptive or prescriptive; people and organizations and dictionaries are. For example, Polish is overseen by the RJP (the Polish Language Council), Finnish — by KOTUS (Institute for the Languages of Finland), and so on. But they're not to serve themselves, but the people which actually use the languages. If a change becomes mainstream, the RJP will vote itself over to its side.

It's important to remember that institutions like the LLG are not allowed to patronize us or to tell us that ‘this is how we do things because it's how we do them’. It's the people who have the right to choose — many have chosen against the absolutist bullshit. And that's why your community shrinks day by day.

 

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

That's fine. They can leave.

You don't have the right to control who's around. Definitely not if they're not misbehaving. So far, the reasons for leaving the Lojban community have been weariness and helplessness. And you can't expect to deserve to be treated with due respect if people are ostracized and stigmatized.

 

Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.

They don't need the bullcrap that surrounds both. That's what it is. Many such people make these decisions against what their hearts tell them, but sanity is more important than appeasement.

 

And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.

There is space; there's little incentive. The halls have been decked with spikes.

 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.

You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.

Dismissal is not the right path to take. As I said above, this *will* turn against you. The people united will never be defeated.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps it's time to do the right thing — fork. Somebody (maybe me myself, who knows) should do God's work and rethink the grammar, rethink the vocab, rethink the approach. Because if you stick to being stuck and you're stuck in being stuck, then the people watching who have enough integrity to step back and distance themselves a little so they're not dragged into the pit will leave you be. And that's what you want — to be left alone. But a committee doesn't exist with a community, and since the community has pretty much dispersed, the committee has failed to serve it.

I'm not going to drag this pointless rowing about for any longer; it's Easter and I'm supposed to rejoice with my family. All I can say is: if you are sure you know what you're doing and you're so adamant to keep at it, then power to you. However, it's you who'll face the consequences, and hurting others is one such consequence.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 16:55:01 UTC+3, clifford escreveu:

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.  

Yeah I just reminded everyone who would be confused otherwise. "Lojban is done, no longer usable" this kind of thoughts you know.

 

My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”

Well I wonder who is working in the direction of monoparsing at all? These numerous AI startups?

 

As for why learn Lojban. I guess as usual: dreams of a better spoken language, spoken code, unambiguous language. In some sense Lojban is close to that. It has live support (newcomers get answers from humans), rich history and is (I hope still) not under any JCB-like dictatorship (Everlasting changes to the language).

 In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal.  But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder.  Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable. But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.  

If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents.  

No. Many more.  

Thehe winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret.  Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!).  Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there.

Hm, where?

 

What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join?  Nothing, really.  So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).

Remember Loglan1 book that was creatively rewritten I to the CLL.

 More John Cowans can appear in future.

I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least).  And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar.  After all, I am in the middle of it.  

Idk, in Facebook tokipona group there is some dude called Clifford that every now and then posts philosophical discussions that are hard to grasp.

 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lojban/f1e41358-15f6-469a-9623-11725854d112%40googlegroups.com

.

[uakci]

stevo:

Where can I find out more about these other dialects of Lojban and the supposed problems and their solutions? 

stevo

Sadly, the overall documentation is somewhat scattered. You might want to investigate certain cornerstone pages like the one for zantufa <https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zantufa>, a stellar project which has sadly ground to a halt due to its creator being thrown into Lojban dialect drama*.

‘The Lojban I speak’ <https://gist.github.com/lynn/453a1ccc62aafbc24d2bfbd29bf5cabf> by Lynn (another Lojbanist who's gone inactive) is one other interesting piece. It documents the ‘deviations’ pretty thoroughly, which shows her integrity in using Lojban.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

* A cemented phrase.

PS to gleki: I forgot to supply the footnote, so here it is:

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/lojban/comments/5m912s/official_lojban_lu_catni_gerna_liu_zou/

[uakci]

Hi, OP!

niedz., 12 kwi 2020 o 15:55 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> napisał(a):

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted. 

I think it's time somebody did that.

 

I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.  

You might think this is having your priorities upside down, but you can't advertise a language that satisfies appealing property X (in this case, X = monoparsing) while sacrificing its usability.

 

My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”  

As I've stated in my previous replies in this thread, I think there's none. There are new loglangs out there which deserve more attention and whose setup is way healthier than the current one; not to sound my own horn, but Toaq is one example of this. (The author is currently working on a full linguistic grammar of the language; I'm quite excited for what's to come.) You're welcome to join :)

 

In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal.  But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder.  Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable.

Perhaps ‘making a viable language out of the scraps’ is a vain task to embark on after all — why not start from the ground up?

 

But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.

I have to disagree somewhat. As much as I bash Lojban for how it's organized and how much the leadership and the ones of kin do to fend off criticism, learning Lojban was a groundbreaking event of my life — it changed the way I thought of phenomena. (Perhaps now is the time for something else than a revolutionary language — perhaps something like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit…). However, languages have goals, and if the only goal a language has is to be a {mencti}-able curiosity, then I agree.

 

If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents.  The winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret.  Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!).  Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there. What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join?  Nothing, really.  So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).

I've proposed calling LLG Lojban ‘Base Lojban’ (cf. last email). However, power corrupts, which is what ultimately leads to what we have now: the ‘community’ running on dirges of internet fame (remember that xkcd strip from 157 years ago?) and some misconceptions that you'd acquire as you read Lojban's (unfulfilled) mission statement. Those who want to unite will unite — I do speak Lojban with a couple of friends. Even though it might not be as much fun as spending time in a large-ish community and doing good deeds there (like translations — something we all like), it's still better than the status quo where people who dare disagree with the one and only dialect are to screw off.

 

I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least).  And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar.  After all, I am in the middle of it.  

I second that proposal (though any other language will do you good — any X such that X is not Lojban, that is).

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 17:07:28 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

niedz., 12 kwi 2020 o 13:02 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.

So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance. 

Sounds oxymoronic to me.

pycyn started with the goal of Lojban (logic, monoparsing...) But the discussion shifted the topic a lot since then.

 

 

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.

That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.

They will also be ready for the inevitable, which is that there are commonly used grammatical structures which the CLL wilfully omits.

 

Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.

 

*Your* community.

And it's time I made a small correction. It's been a great mistake to call you a community. Communities stick together, but this make-pretend community is entrenched in disputes. The departure of a great member of a community typically comes off as worthy of grievance, but this community has seen giants go.

You mean tinkerers?

 

Communities aren't the sort of places that come and go; you come and stay. Communities are something people contribute to through willpower and effort and their precious man-hours (and woman-hours too), but the only experience I've seen radiate from those who've tried and failed to incorporate themselves in the Lojbanic 'community' is one that's based on full-on unreciprocation. In a well-functioning community, people leave when they think they've done their dues; in a pathological community like this one, people leave because there's so much work to do that they're barred from doing.

 

I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.

Sure, spend effort on what matters least. Just to keep the *air* of business.

The business is done when certain goals are complete. This is not the goal of the language of course but the documentation.

 

As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.

So you've jumped on the programming language train… oh boy do I have a lot to say in this matter.

Programming languages do improve.

 

Usually in releases. When backward incompatible then it's clearly asserted so. Lojban community hasn't been aiming at such procedures.

 

Java — a language that's close to relic status — has recently seen additions like lambdas, closures, anonymous classes…

additions

 

Every programming language which does not wish to be yanked off the mainstream train of thought tries its best to include the essential parts of what people want or need or can find in other places. We don't need to force people to use Functional Programming concepts, but we might as well leave those parts in so the ones who want it can have it and be happy.

Have you ever heard about Elm? It, too, is governed by a man who believes he can exercise absolute power. He, too, says things like ‘if you don't do X the Y way, then why are you using our product?’. All in the name of ‘being opinionated’. But we can be opinionated and permissive; we can foster diversity while maintaining a strong baseline; we can be descriptive without going all out. It can all be done, and the way strong Open Source projects are led can tell us a lot about what we're doing wrong. I predict that Elm is going to get forked away from very soon; Lojban, with its despotic attitude and little room for variation, is going to be moved away from. It's happening, and once it's reached full impetus, you won't be able to stop it.

 

 

However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

What I think is of little importance too.

You say that, but you're very strong in asserting your opinions. If you think you should bow to the Founding Fathers of the language and to the demigods which preside in the committee (whatever its form of presentation is), then you're doing this in vain. Language is to free thought, not enslave it.

Those demigods already paralyzed my activity.

 

 

I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.

I don't have a problem with treating CLL Lojban as ‘baseline’ Lojban. In fact, I wrote a little essay on the matter around two years ago [1], and although it's hard for me to gauge the reactions, I can tell you that calling the ‘official dialect’ the ‘base(line) dialect’ doesn't do said dialect any harm — quite the opposite: it empowers people who want to experiment to experiment, and gives this base dialect an incentive to develop — slowly and rationally.

I have no problem with that. But I dohave a problem when newcomers are being said "the CLL is obsolete". Who are you to say that? What do you present in exchange? Nothing as clifford just said.

 

If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).

See above. And the ‘tinkerers’ (as you've taken to calling them) aren't at fault; you're just getting a taste of your own medicine.

 

Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.

You know what makes learning harder? Tons upon tons of cmavo which nobody really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in gismu frames.

 

No one is supposed to learn all the words of English or all the keywords of Java.

 

Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs. ZEhA vs. FAhA vs. BAI. And if your point is that the CLL is a definitive source of knowledge about what Lojban 1.0 the forever version should look like, then what about xorlo? This starts to feel like I'm trying to persuade a biblical absolutism into rejecting the absoluteness of the Bible. And if that's the case, the best approach is to walk away and leave them be; many people have done that so far. It's a telling sign.

As I said it's a nice sign. If you learned Lojban and want something else create something else. That's fine.

However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose  those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.

Python 3 was released in 2008, and the official deprecation date for Python 2 was announced to be 2020. Do you really think that 12 years isn't enough to hop over?

If there had been developers in Lojbanistan... There were none except for rlpowell who released the CLL 1.1 

You're making a moot point: in Python 3, `print` is made into a regular function; previously, it was a keyword. This reduces complexity, which is good — it regularizes the treatment of `print` (what's so special about it? why can't my procedure be made into a keyword?). The Python community has encouraged switching over to v3 for a long time, yielding such tools as 2to3.

All this shows that change can be allowed, even if you prefer to keep it slow. Today's language leaders' standpoint is not to attempt any change, even as it wheezes past them.

 

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

English is not prescriptive.

Languages themselves can't be descriptive or prescriptive; people and organizations and dictionaries are. For example, Polish is overseen by the RJP (the Polish Language Council), Finnish — by KOTUS (Institute for the Languages of Finland), and so on. But they're not to serve themselves, but the people which actually use the languages. If a change becomes mainstream, the RJP will vote itself over to its side.

It's important to remember that institutions like the LLG are not allowed to patronize us or to tell us that ‘this is how we do things because it's how we do them’.

True.

 

It's the people who have the right to choose — many have chosen against the absolutist bullshit. And that's why your community shrinks day by day. 

 

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

That's fine. They can leave.

You don't have the right to control who's around. Definitely not if they're not misbehaving. So far, the reasons for leaving the Lojban community have been weariness and helplessness. And you can't expect to deserve to be treated with due respect if people are ostracized and stigmatized.

I am myself ostracized by the LLG.

 

 

Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.

They don't need the bullcrap that surrounds both. That's what it is. Many such people make these decisions against what their hearts tell them, but sanity is more important than appeasement.

 

And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.

There is space; there's little incentive. The halls have been decked with spikes.

 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.

You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.

Dismissal is not the right path to take. As I said above, this *will* turn against you.

My role is of little importance. Once again, I don't care of fluent speakers. They are free to go. Newcomers need help.

The people united will never be defeated.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps it's time to do the right thing — fork.

Please, create a new name for it. LoCCan3 of whatever

 

Somebody (maybe me myself, who knows) should do God's work and rethink the grammar, rethink the vocab, rethink the approach. Because if you stick to being stuck and you're stuck in being stuck, then the people watching who have enough integrity to step back and distance themselves a little so they're not dragged into the pit will leave you be. And that's what you want — to be left alone. But a committee doesn't exist with a community, and since the community has pretty much dispersed, the committee has failed to serve it.

I'm not going to drag this pointless rowing about for any longer; it's Easter and I'm supposed to rejoice with my family. All I can say is: if you are sure you know what you're doing and you're so adamant to keep at it, then power to you. However, it's you who'll face the consequences, and hurting others is one such consequence.

It's a volunteer work. I know what I'm doing.

P.S. Sorry for not answering to all the replies. Some looked to me like containing some harsh language.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[Mike S.]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 9:55 AM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.

Do you have evidence that the Lojbanist community as a whole has abandoned the goal of "monoparsing" (which I take to mean self-segregating morphology and unambiguous grammar)?  There may be a couple people who feel it's unimportant, but in my experience, if you leave out a {ku}, you *will* be corrected.  As far as I am aware, *all* of the experimental parsers and *all* of the major reform proposals, e.g. as Solpahi's connective reform, honor monoparsing (they simply rely on >1 lookahead).  I am not sure why you believe that Lojbanists no longer care about monoparsing.  The opposite is true, as far as I can tell.

As far as your words "[Lojban's] primary goal, monoparsing" -- that's to me like saying "a house's primary goal, having a stable foundation".  In my view, the primary goal of a logical language is to have a formal semantics, and a formal grammar is a requirement for that, just as the primary goal of a house is to be lived in, and having a stable foundation is a requirement for that.

 

 

My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”  In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal.  But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder.  Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable. But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.

Let's be honest.  Rex May showed in the 1980s that the unambiguous morphology could be made not only simpler but *extremely* simpler, and both the makers of Xorban and the grossly underrated Richard Morneau showed that the unambiguous grammar could be made not only simpler but *extremely* simpler.  Lojban is based on a rather clumsy (though original and interesting and exciting in 1960) prototype clumsily complexified by decades of patches upon patches.  I guess people stick with it because it has something the other languages do not have (namely a history and a community), though that may eventually change.  Already Toaq has an active user community and I predict other languages will be coming online in the next few years.  But I also predict the Lojban community will continue to exist.

 

If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents.  The winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret.  Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!).  Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there. What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join?  Nothing, really.  So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).

I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least).  And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar.  After all, I am in the middle of it.

I will not be jumping on the Toki Pona parlor-game bandwagon any time soon.  Toki Pona is ridiculously overhyped and grossly overrated in my opinion, is full of its own problems, is a total joke and cop-out in terms of usability ("just don't have words!" -- wow, brilliant idea, Sonya; that solves everything), and certainly does not represent a satisfactory language for those of us seeking a better logical language.

-Mike

[uakci]

niedz., 12 kwi 2020 o 16:31 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 17:07:28 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:

niedz., 12 kwi 2020 o 13:02 Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.

So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance. 

Sounds oxymoronic to me.

pycyn started with the goal of Lojban (logic, monoparsing...) But the discussion shifted the topic a lot since then.

It has, and you're not helping it. :P

 

 

 

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.

That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.

They will also be ready for the inevitable, which is that there are commonly used grammatical structures which the CLL wilfully omits.

 

Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.

 

*Your* community.

And it's time I made a small correction. It's been a great mistake to call you a community. Communities stick together, but this make-pretend community is entrenched in disputes. The departure of a great member of a community typically comes off as worthy of grievance, but this community has seen giants go.

You mean tinkerers?

See, this is the attitude I despise. Language is communal. You have no right to decide who stays, and you have no moral grounds to pick on those who decided to get a little creative.

 

 

Communities aren't the sort of places that come and go; you come and stay. Communities are something people contribute to through willpower and effort and their precious man-hours (and woman-hours too), but the only experience I've seen radiate from those who've tried and failed to incorporate themselves in the Lojbanic 'community' is one that's based on full-on unreciprocation. In a well-functioning community, people leave when they think they've done their dues; in a pathological community like this one, people leave because there's so much work to do that they're barred from doing.

 

I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.

Sure, spend effort on what matters least. Just to keep the *air* of business.

The business is done when certain goals are complete. This is not the goal of the language of course but the documentation.

So what are you waiting for? If work is to be done, then may it be done. 35 years ought to have been enough.

 

 

As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.

So you've jumped on the programming language train… oh boy do I have a lot to say in this matter.

Programming languages do improve.

 

Usually in releases. When backward incompatible then it's clearly asserted so. Lojban community hasn't been aiming at such procedures.

The comfort of having a separate major release is that you can go fix the mistakes of the past. The Lojbanic leadership, which you're the perfect representation of, does not aim to fix those mistakes. So it doesn't need any procedures or any releases.

 

 

Java — a language that's close to relic status — has recently seen additions like lambdas, closures, anonymous classes…

additions

They're still changes.

 

 

Every programming language which does not wish to be yanked off the mainstream train of thought tries its best to include the essential parts of what people want or need or can find in other places. We don't need to force people to use Functional Programming concepts, but we might as well leave those parts in so the ones who want it can have it and be happy.

Have you ever heard about Elm? It, too, is governed by a man who believes he can exercise absolute power. He, too, says things like ‘if you don't do X the Y way, then why are you using our product?’. All in the name of ‘being opinionated’. But we can be opinionated and permissive; we can foster diversity while maintaining a strong baseline; we can be descriptive without going all out. It can all be done, and the way strong Open Source projects are led can tell us a lot about what we're doing wrong. I predict that Elm is going to get forked away from very soon; Lojban, with its despotic attitude and little room for variation, is going to be moved away from. It's happening, and once it's reached full impetus, you won't be able to stop it.

 

 

However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

What I think is of little importance too.

You say that, but you're very strong in asserting your opinions. If you think you should bow to the Founding Fathers of the language and to the demigods which preside in the committee (whatever its form of presentation is), then you're doing this in vain. Language is to free thought, not enslave it.

Those demigods already paralyzed my activity.

So why do you put up with them? As I said, they're not out there to patronize you. Make your own stuff, put it on a different web page. In fact, this is something you do already.

 

 

 

I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.

I don't have a problem with treating CLL Lojban as ‘baseline’ Lojban. In fact, I wrote a little essay on the matter around two years ago [1], and although it's hard for me to gauge the reactions, I can tell you that calling the ‘official dialect’ the ‘base(line) dialect’ doesn't do said dialect any harm — quite the opposite: it empowers people who want to experiment to experiment, and gives this base dialect an incentive to develop — slowly and rationally.

I have no problem with that. But I dohave a problem when newcomers are being said "the CLL is obsolete". Who are you to say that? What do you present in exchange? Nothing as clifford just said.

And who are you say that the CLL is complete and final? Clearly it isn't if every great Lojbanist I know of tries to get around its limitations.

I don't have anything to present in exchange because there hasn't been room for those who want to offer that. If equal room had been made for those who want to stick with what ‘works’ and those who want to experiment, we would've got along. But there is favouritism, which kills healthy competition.

 

If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).

See above. And the ‘tinkerers’ (as you've taken to calling them) aren't at fault; you're just getting a taste of your own medicine.

 

Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.

You know what makes learning harder? Tons upon tons of cmavo which nobody really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in gismu frames.

 

No one is supposed to learn all the words of English or all the keywords of Java.

Yes, but when they're removed, you hear bickering. Lojban could've done with a minimal core. But it decided to go all out, which has led us to the ultimate feature creep.

As for minimal cores, I point to Toaq. It has 15× less grammar; yet, it manages to express what Lojban can, and more. I don't mean to make a convert out of you; however, if you have the time, do yourself a little comparative analysis. You might learn that, with the intermediate step that is Gūa spì, Toaq has managed to undo Lojban's mistakes. Perhaps the latter could learn some from the former… if only it weren't stopped from doing it by fiat.

 

 

Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs. ZEhA vs. FAhA vs. BAI. And if your point is that the CLL is a definitive source of knowledge about what Lojban 1.0 the forever version should look like, then what about xorlo? This starts to feel like I'm trying to persuade a biblical absolutism into rejecting the absoluteness of the Bible. And if that's the case, the best approach is to walk away and leave them be; many people have done that so far. It's a telling sign.

As I said it's a nice sign. If you learned Lojban and want something else create something else. That's fine.

But not even you or I have the right to decide what's Lojban and what isn't. Reminder: {lojbo} means ‘Lojbanic/Loglandic’. And the dialects aren't really ‘something else’ — they're built on the same core. I respect the work that's been put into the core, but I don't respect the horrendous bureaucratic edifice that's been erected thereupon.

 

However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose  those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.

Python 3 was released in 2008, and the official deprecation date for Python 2 was announced to be 2020. Do you really think that 12 years isn't enough to hop over?

If there had been developers in Lojbanistan... There were none except for rlpowell who released the CLL 1.1 

Which means that it shouldn't be a person who writes a CLL 2 — it should be people. If the LLG organized an effort to improve Lojban by writing a v2 of the CLL, it would've gone perfectly well, for many could have a say, and through civilized debate, a new core could be settled upon. It's not that there aren't discussions — it's that they're ‘out of the scope of the enterprise’. (I do call bullshit on that.)

 

You're making a moot point: in Python 3, `print` is made into a regular function; previously, it was a keyword. This reduces complexity, which is good — it regularizes the treatment of `print` (what's so special about it? why can't my procedure be made into a keyword?). The Python community has encouraged switching over to v3 for a long time, yielding such tools as 2to3.

All this shows that change can be allowed, even if you prefer to keep it slow. Today's language leaders' standpoint is not to attempt any change, even as it wheezes past them.

 

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

English is not prescriptive.

Languages themselves can't be descriptive or prescriptive; people and organizations and dictionaries are. For example, Polish is overseen by the RJP (the Polish Language Council), Finnish — by KOTUS (Institute for the Languages of Finland), and so on. But they're not to serve themselves, but the people which actually use the languages. If a change becomes mainstream, the RJP will vote itself over to its side.

It's important to remember that institutions like the LLG are not allowed to patronize us or to tell us that ‘this is how we do things because it's how we do them’.

True.

I'm glad you agree.

 

 

It's the people who have the right to choose — many have chosen against the absolutist bullshit. And that's why your community shrinks day by day. 

 

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

That's fine. They can leave.

You don't have the right to control who's around. Definitely not if they're not misbehaving. So far, the reasons for leaving the Lojban community have been weariness and helplessness. And you can't expect to deserve to be treated with due respect if people are ostracized and stigmatized.

I am myself ostracized by the LLG.

Then make the jump: find people who agree with you and establish a new ‘headquarters’ for Lojban. If enough people agree with you, you'll outnumber the ‘baseline’ — your fork will win. However, people tend to get so fed up with this whole ordeal that they construct new languages instead of trying to fix what's broken. Let time be the judge; I already do, and I'm pretty sure that where I've placed my bets is where there is going to be most happiness and satisfaction.

 

 

 

Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.

They don't need the bullcrap that surrounds both. That's what it is. Many such people make these decisions against what their hearts tell them, but sanity is more important than appeasement.

 

And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.

There is space; there's little incentive. The halls have been decked with spikes.

 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.

You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.

Dismissal is not the right path to take. As I said above, this *will* turn against you.

My role is of little importance. Once again, I don't care of fluent speakers. They are free to go. Newcomers need help.

Newcomers need help for what? They will learn the CLL dialect if that's the only dialect they're exposed to. But if you show people the full gamut of choices, then everybody can find their fit.

 

The people united will never be defeated.

~ ~ ~

Perhaps it's time to do the right thing — fork.

Please, create a new name for it. LoCCan3 of whatever

I needn't.

 

 

Somebody (maybe me myself, who knows) should do God's work and rethink the grammar, rethink the vocab, rethink the approach. Because if you stick to being stuck and you're stuck in being stuck, then the people watching who have enough integrity to step back and distance themselves a little so they're not dragged into the pit will leave you be. And that's what you want — to be left alone. But a committee doesn't exist with a community, and since the community has pretty much dispersed, the committee has failed to serve it.

I'm not going to drag this pointless rowing about for any longer; it's Easter and I'm supposed to rejoice with my family. All I can say is: if you are sure you know what you're doing and you're so adamant to keep at it, then power to you. However, it's you who'll face the consequences, and hurting others is one such consequence.

It's a volunteer work. I know what I'm doing.

Godspeed.

 

P.S. Sorry for not answering to all the replies. Some looked to me like containing some harsh language.

I get the same impression from some of your points. However, I never miss any.

Besides, who's to speak of harshness? Aren't you the guy who bullied guskant until she couldn't stand it any further? I watch what happens in Lojbanistan, and your words certainly aren't the warmest or most welcoming.

This being said, I know that you're going to do what you think is right. And that I'm going to do what I think is right. No matter how harshly you and I express our reservations, it's time which will uncover who's right. And time does work against the LLG, and you're with the LLG, at least with regards to ideology.

I do not wish to continue the discussion if you think your opinions don't matter ‘in the long run’. After all, there are many important things to do, like fixing typos in the Holy Scripture.

Happy Easter.

— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.

[John E Clifford]

Well,, pokey toenails does have a clear project (simplicity, specified phonologically and grammatically} and some clear goals (well, more or less). And it has a fairly large community of willing combatants and interlocutors.  Hard to find for other interesting languages (John Q doesn’t generally answer questions about Ithkuil, for example, and no one else even pretends).   

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[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 18:01:38 UTC+3, Mike S. escreveu:

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 9:55 AM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  KI learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.

Do you have evidence that the Lojbanist community as a whole has abandoned the goal of "monoparsing" (which I take to mean self-segregating morphology and unambiguous grammar)? 

I have one. When I asked about inconsistencies in the PEG grammar I was given an answer that some semantic parser should do that job. However, no such parser was envisioned at that time. So yes, it's avoiding the topic of not abandoning it at all.

Even within ordinary AST system there are no discussions of internal grammar of UI or fu'e. It's a topic for geeks maybe that's the reason.

[Mike S.]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:13 PM Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 18:01:38 UTC+3, Mike S. escreveu:

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 9:55 AM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  KI learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.

Do you have evidence that the Lojbanist community as a whole has abandoned the goal of "monoparsing" (which I take to mean self-segregating morphology and unambiguous grammar)? 

I have one. When I asked about inconsistencies in the PEG grammar I was given an answer that some semantic parser should do that job. However, no such parser was envisioned at that time. So yes, it's avoiding the topic of not abandoning it at all.

This is your evidence that monoparsing has been abandoned?  If monoparsing were abandoned, no one would be writing PEG grammars in the first place. 

Even within ordinary AST system there are no discussions of internal grammar of UI or fu'e. It's a topic for geeks maybe that's the reason.

Or of PA.  Meanwhile, it seems to me that BAI and FA and others could have been combined.  So yeah the syntactic categories could have been both split and lumped differently.

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 19:44:25 UTC+3, Mike S. escreveu:

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 12:13 PM Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> wrote:

Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 18:01:38 UTC+3, Mike S. escreveu:

On Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 9:55 AM 'John E Clifford' via lojban <loj...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  KI learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.

Do you have evidence that the Lojbanist community as a whole has abandoned the goal of "monoparsing" (which I take to mean self-segregating morphology and unambiguous grammar)? 

I have one. When I asked about inconsistencies in the PEG grammar I was given an answer that some semantic parser should do that job. However, no such parser was envisioned at that time. So yes, it's avoiding the topic of not abandoning it at all.

This is your evidence that monoparsing has been abandoned?  If monoparsing were abandoned, no one would be writing PEG grammars in the first place. 

From the time camxes was born there has been no progress. They all got stuck in peg formalism and tinkering camxes. 

[And Rosta]

Thanks for those links. In reading this interesting thread, I find myself perplexed as to what it is that the Progressive Lojbanists want, that leads to this ire, bitterness or disillusionment. I understand the Conservative Lojbanist position, and also Radical positions, such as remedying all the remediable defects of Lojban, which then yields Toaq. But what is the rationale for the intermediate position? I understand that there was a flowering of dialects, but while all surely improved Base Lojban, surely none improved Lojban to the point of adequacy. And if, for some reason that I don't understand, the Conservative control of LLG was a problem, why did the Progressives not join LLG and vote out the Conservative leadership?

My best guess as to the reason for ire, bitterness or disillusionment is that prior to the development of Toaq and not-yet-created loglangological conspectuses, the typical loglanger would discover Lojban, become deeply immersed in it (even, in some extreme cases, reading the proceedings of the Jboske and Lojban list archives many years after they took place!), then notice more and more flaws, and then gradually come to realization of the irreparability of Lojban, but only after investing thousands upon thousands of hours of largely wasted effort, this wasted effort being the cause of ire, bitterness or disillusionment. But this still doesn't explain why ill-feelings would be directed at Lojbanic Conservatism, since the irreparability of Lojban is due to the design of Lojban itself, not to Conservatism.

Or maybe the apparent existence of irate, bitter or disillusioned Progressives is just an illusion produced by this thread?

--And.

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[scope845h...@icebubble.org]

Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> writes:

> I have one. When I asked about inconsistencies in the PEG grammar I was
> given an answer that some semantic parser should do that job. However, no

What "inconsistencies" exist in the PEG grammar?

uakci <ciuak...@gmail.com> writes:

> really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in
> gismu frames. Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs.

To what irregularities in gismu frames do you refer?

{ta'o doi pycyn}, there is such a thing as a paragraph. :P

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Em terça-feira, 14 de abril de 2020 18:34:46 UTC+3, scope845h...@icebubble.org escreveu:

Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com> writes:
> I have one. When I asked about inconsistencies in the PEG grammar I was
> given an answer that some semantic parser should do that job. However, no

What "inconsistencies" exist in the PEG grammar?

There is no "the" PEG grammar of Lojban. There are multiple grammars. In case of ilmentufa the immediate one I can recognize is the inability to compile it due to infinite recursion. When it's fixed I can tell you of others. But currently I can't even run it :) 

[uakci]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 17:34, <scope845h...@icebubble.org> wrote:

uakci <ciuak...@gmail.com> writes:

> really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in
> gismu frames. Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs.

To what irregularities in gismu frames do you refer?

Here are a few: 

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

[H. Task]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: H. Task <sel...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Apr 26, 2020, 16:31
Subject: Re: [lojban] Why Lojban fails
To: <mai...@gmail.com>

Hello, Mike. I was wondering if you had links to the late Mr. May's original morphology proposal from the '80s. The material on his Ceqli website is pretty disorganized and patchy.

I have been working for a while on simplifying loglan morphology without sacrificing phonological averageness. That is, I believe that the loglans (including Ceqli) are all unnecessarily stilted in their morphological design, resulting in languages that appear more alien, and put more cumbersome limits on word shape, than they have to.

Thanks,

H.T.

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[Mike S.]

On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 4:32 PM H. Task <sel...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello, Mike. I was wondering if you had links to the late Mr. May's original morphology proposal from the '80s. The material on his Ceqli website is pretty disorganized and patchy.

Ceqli wasn't published as its own language until 1996 or so, but the basic gist of Ceqli's morphology was conceived in the 1980s as a proposed reform of Loglan. The earliest existing version of May's proposal that I am aware of is found on the Lognet (Loglan periodical) archives:

http://www.loglan.org/Articles2/critique-of-Loglan-morphology2.html

Unfortunately Part 1 of May's critique of Loglan is missing.  If anyone has the old Lognet issues, it would be nice to get them published online.

Notice that James Cooke Brown responded by calling May's work "Rexlan" and making a long-winded reply amounting to "here's why everything is fine the way it is".

http://www.loglan.org/Articles2/defense-of-Loglan-morphology2.html

 

I have been working for a while on simplifying loglan morphology without sacrificing phonological averageness. That is, I believe that the loglans (including Ceqli) are all unnecessarily stilted in their morphological design, resulting in languages that appear more alien, and put more cumbersome limits on word shape, than they have to.

I don't know what you have in mind, but there are many, many possible ways to achieve morphological self-segregation. I have invented a couple novel designs myself, one that uses high and low tones to mark morpheme boundaries, and another whose details I have not publicized yet.

It's subjective, but I tend to agree that Ceqli's rules for starting all morphemes with obstruents starts to feel monotonous after a while, but it's still interesting because it's so very simple and such a stark contrast with Loglan/Lojban, which is so morphologically complicated.  Luckily there is ample room for middle approaches.

 

Thanks,

H.T.

-Mike

-Mike

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