From vilva@xivas.animal.helsinki.fi Tue Oct 16 10:30:02 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-members); Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:30:02 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sender-01.it.helsinki.fi ([128.214.205.139]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IhqEw-0008KI-Rb for llg-members@lojban.org; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:30:01 -0700 Received: from xivas.animal.helsinki.fi (xivas.animal.helsinki.fi [128.214.70.224]) by sender-01.it.helsinki.fi (8.13.8/8.13.8) with SMTP id l9GHTuuU000691 for ; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:29:56 +0300 Received: (qmail 25563 invoked by uid 500); 16 Oct 2007 17:29:56 -0000 Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 20:29:56 +0300 From: Veijo Vilva To: llg-members@lojban.org Subject: [llg-members] Re: LLG AGM 2007: The Most Common Word In The Language Message-ID: <20071016172956.GA24966@xivas> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 424 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: veijo.vilva@helsinki.fi Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-members@lojban.org X-list: llg-members Hello everybody. coi ro do Some of you will remember me from the olden times when I was very active, some of you have heard of me, to some I'm an unknown entity. I've been away for a long time, I went away for some very objective reasons and some subjective, at the time mostly subconscious. What I'm going to say will perhaps make some of you angry, but I just don't give a damn. I'm an old man, I'll be retiring in some twenty month after forty-four years of work and I thought I'd pick up Lojban again, start writing. However, it seems there will be no Lojban anymore, it will have been replaced by Xorlo, which is something completely different. At the time, some fifteen years ago when I became acquinted with Lojban, I wouldn't have bothered if xorlo had been in place, Lojban would have been just another language, nothing special or elegant about it - I'll return to that. When I left, Lojban was a tiger cub with teething trouble and some minor blemishes, but instead of working out truly Lojbanic solutions like we did with the relative clauses, you solved everything by kicking in the teeth, leaving a toothless, suspiciously malglico looking wreck of a creature, who just sucks, deep, and very at that. Lojban was elegant. The gadri expressed the most fundamental and essential distinction, that between objective and subjective, instead of the relatively minor distinction between definite and indefinite, which a small group of languages is emphasizing, or the distinction between partial and total, which must be expressed in every Finnish sentence having an object. Perhaps all languages have mechanisms to express these distinctions, but the emphasis is different. It took me a long while to figure out the truly Finnish way of expressing the difference between definite and indefinite and even longer to realize that Lojban, Ur-Lojban, had mechanisms to make this distinction just as easily without perverting the gadri - or even two mechanisms without even resorting to cmavo, i.e. conversion and the general arrangement of sumti, analogous to the way it is handled in most natural languages. There is no need to rob lo* of their most valuable attribute, that of claiming "the really is". The erasure of the default quantification is another, just as grave disgrace. The explicit defaults were one of the most valuable features of the real Lojban. They may have caused some problems with negation, but the right solution would have been to work out these problems instead of totally wrecking the whole framework. Even the universal claim made by the inner quantifier of lo is/was just as it must be and really ought to be, it is quite essential to imply that claim and then use restrictive clauses or suitable cmavo, as the case may be, to handle all practical circumstances - that is the only logical and certainly the only truly Lojbanic way. Anything else is just muddying the waters. Xorlo is an abomination. Instead of elegantly writing "mi viska le cribe" I'd have to write something like "mi viska ro le su'o cribe" and, even worse, instead of "mi viska lo gerku" I'd have to write "mi viska su'o lo ro gerku poi zasti" or something even worse in order to express even the very simplest things. The naked gadri of Xorlo are totally useless, totally emasculated. You people can't be serious. I really hope so, I really do. This was putting things nicely, very, very gently. When I read through the xorlo definition, I thought I'd just quietly fade away, not bother, but Lojban has been very important to me, for a long time, and I just couldn't let be, perhaps for the final time. You are, of course, welcome to kick me off if you feel offended enough. However, anyway, I hope you really think through what I said above, Lojban ought to mean enough to you. Lojban was supposed to be something different, a new way of thinking, not just another constructed language, and it certainly doesn't need to be easy for any single linguistic group of people. I am the lone non-Indo-European here, I look at things and language from a wider viewpoint. My mother tongue is Finnish and I used to know another, quite unrelated non-IE language quite well, i.e. Japanese. At school I had to study three IE languages, eight years of Swedish, seven years of German and but three years of English. After that I've studied some French, Russian and a wee bit of Spanish. During the last forty-seven years I've read more English than most U.K. University students, let alone the U.S. ones, both quantitatively and qualitatively, even very esoteric things, starting with Chaucer and Julian of Norwich in original spelling. I know English even if my writing isn't any too good these days, for lack of active use. Yet I'm no linguist, I'm an IT specialist, a geneticist and a dozen other things. And I feel deeply about Lojban, i.e. the Lojban that used to be and is now just another endangered species among languages, apparently dying a grim death before reaching maturity, poor child, alas. I didn't write this in order to start a discussion with you but to give you an impulse to start a discussion among you, a very serious discussion before it is just too late. Perhaps I'll come back when the objective circumstances of my everyday life permit it, perhaps not. Good day, gentlemen. co'o mi'e veion