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Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2012 21:45:26 +0100
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Is there any demand for LoCCan3?
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John E Clifford, On 03/07/2012 17:36:
> & has been missing a while, so his ideas are not in the current files. Th=
ey were iirc mainly technical and philosophic, so not (as) relevant to stru=
ctural questions. (I hope this remark is inaccurate enough to get & to reen=
ter the lists.)

Okay. So I'll address Gleki's question about "Is there any demand for LoCCa=
n3", and also this, because Jonathan could equally well have asked the same=
 question of me:
Jonathan Jones, On 01/07/2012 22:59:
> John, I was wondering. It seems to me that you rarely contribute
> anything to the community, and when you do, it is usually to
> criticize, to point out what you perceive to be flaws in Lojban. You
> also frequently express your opinion as to the need for a LoCCan3, as
> you put it. From my experience, it seems that you don't like Lojban.
>
> Now, I may be wrong about all of this, and I wouldn't be surprised if
> you contribute(d) a great deal that I'm unaware of. But assuming the
> above is true, and these are your feelings, why are you hear? I am
> truly curious to know why you maintain a presence in something it
> seems you not only do not care about, but apparently actively
> dislike, especially given your recent comment about being unable to
> keep a straight face in discussing Lojban.

I have for decades (more than two, not quite three, so far -- i.e. all my a=
dult life) been very interested in the idea of there existing a certain sor=
t of loglang and of this loglang being available to the world for use. I th=
ink it would be a boon for the world to have recourse to an ergonomically u=
sable unambiguous language. Not everybody interested in Loglan--Lojban is i=
nterested in any sort of loglang, but it does seem as though quite a few pe=
ople involved in Loglan--Lojban have been interested in a loglang, and also=
 as though many of those interested in loglangs, especially ones with a com=
munity of sponsors, gravitate towards Loglan--Lojban.

I define a loglang as one that can unambiguously encode any explicit predic=
ate logic formula in a way that is no less concise than the way natlangs wo=
uld express the formula (with much greater ambiguity and leaving much more =
to be glorked from context). The relevance of the concision requirement is =
firstly that without it, the gain in clarity is not necessarily worth the e=
ffort of greater verbosity; rather, the goal is to up the clarity-to-verbos=
ity ratio. And secondly, designing a language that can unambiguously encode=
 any explicit predicate logic formula is trivially easy; it's only the conc=
ision requirement that makes the challenge difficult (or maybe impossible).=
 Not everybody defines their sought-for loglang by these criteria. For exam=
ple, John Clifford and Martin Bays are very preoccupied with having a highl=
y specified semantics for the loglang, which is something I'm rather unsymp=
athetic to.

Considered *as a loglang (in my definition of that term)*, Lojban is a comp=
lete failure, though it must be borne in mind that it wasn't fundamentally =
designed to be a loglang; the loglang aspect is more part of its (undeserve=
d) reputation than its essence. (I should clarify that, once the BPFK does =
its work, which basically involves Robin wielding the political muscle and =
Xorxes wielding the intellectual muscle, Lojban would succeed in being logi=
cally unambiguous. The failure is to meet the (never aimed-for) criterion o=
f concision.) (I should also note that Lojban has been a success relative t=
o the goals of the founders of Lojban, namely to create a public-domain sta=
ble "finished" version of Loglan around which a community of users can grow=
.)

I'm here (on this list) partly because I've been part of the community for =
over 20 years, and at certain times have been the most active participant, =
so I feel a sense of (always marginalized) belonging. But also I'm here bec=
ause I think there's a chance of a genuine loglang coupled with a community=
 of sponsors emerging from the Loglan--Lojban community. There might come a=
 time when enough folk that think as I do have gravitated hither that some =
sort of critical mass is formed and work on an ergonomically usable loglang=
 is begun.

It's easy to think of ways of drastically improving on the Lojban design. F=
or example, discard rafsi, make all gismu CCV -- becomes conciser and easie=
r to learn in one go. Or discard almost all selmaho, default to Polish nota=
tion syntax, and you have something much conciser, much more easy to learn,=
 much more easy to parse. I suppose that even these changes are so drastic =
that they'd amount to discarding the current Loglan--Lojban entirely and st=
arting over, but I think a complete redesign is anyway necessary because of=
 the one fundamental design challenge of a loglang, which is the challenge =
of representing where two argument-places have the same value (e.g. in "Joh=
n laughed and sneezed", where the argument-place of John(), of Laugh() and =
of Sneeze() have the same value): specifically, the challenge is to represe=
nt that in a concise and human-usable way (bearing in mind that a normal se=
ntence might involve dozens of groups of argument-places that have the same=
 value). You c
ould call this loglang "LoCCan3", but, unlike John Clifford's vision, it co=
uldn't be achieved by incremental revisions to LoCCan2.

--And.

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