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Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 14:34:52 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
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On 5/22/2014 10:26 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban wrote:
> Nice to know that the project, despite all that has been said about it,
> is just writing adequate definitions for cmavo

That was how we started.  Of course, some have added their own goals to 
that basic one, including a switch from YACC to some other kind of 
grammar specification that I do not understand (YACC was hard enough for 
me to grasp).

> -- excluding, for now, I
> suppose, all the experimental ones,

Correct.  If some of the experimental ones were worth adding, that would 
be a later phase, and should including assigning them to 
non-experimental cmavo.

> but keeping all the established
> highly superfluous ones (cultural neutrality does NOT require that we
> can do anything any language can do)

It doesn't require it, but that is one possible way to achieve it, and 
probably one of the less problematic ones when the work is being done 
mostly by monolingual English speakers (as was the case for the first 
few years).  It also can make translation easier, and offered some 
possibility at increasing the use of the language for other academic 
linguistic applications (At one time, I had the interest of Alexis 
Manaster-Ramer in possibly using Lojban as an interlingual glossing 
language (rather than English) for linguistics papers.  The Nootka 
lujvo-sentence I created is one example of this.)

> and not changing the grammar to get rid of the redundant ones.

Likewise.  Redundancy will not truly be recognizable until we have 
numerous fluent speakers from multiple native language backgrounds, and 
using (or trying to use) the parts of the language that have potentially 
redundant features.  (for example, very little has been done with Mex 
which undoubtedly has redundancies because we were trying to encompass 
anything that anyone ever expresses in some kind of formula, including 
the adaptation of non-numerical terminology (how many are in an 
exaltation of doves)

> The joker here seems to be the notion of an
> adequate definition, since all these words have definitions and even
> some commentary,

They may have that now, but they did not have it in 2000, and it isn't 
even close to existing in the current CLL.  The BPFK format was devised 
as a way to assemble the information needed to form an adequate 
definition, including usage examples (Cowan at one point wanted to have 
an example of each cmavo as used in every Yacc rule that invoked its 
selma'o, but we've eased that goal),  The bottom line is that we have 
adequate definitions when no one asks questions that require further 
refinement, and enough coined and actual usage examples that no one asks 
for more when the section is discussed.

We also need a period of looking at interactions between the hopefully 
well-defined cmavo before we can be sure that there are no integration 
problems (we don't need Lojban to become like the Obamacare website - 
individual pieces that somehow fail to integrate).  But I think that 
would be achieved in just a few months once all the pieces of the 
language were approved (I asked for 6 months of integrated review after 
all the sections were approved, during which time, change pages for CLL 
could also be generated to reflect any changes implied by the new 
definitions).

> not to mention reams of discussion if there is anything
> controversial about them.  Surely the boring one just need a write-up
> and the non-boring ones a summary.
> Everybody take a word and spend a few minutes, then the whole thing will
> be done and we can get on with changing everything.  [sarcasm]

We actually made such a claim years ago.  I think one person who knows 
the corpus tools could probably do an excellent job on a BPFK section 
(which has several cmavo) in a week of spare time of there is little 
actual usage and the selma'o are only used in one way in the grammar.

But there were few takers, because at the bottom line I don't think we 
have ever had a half dozen people at any one time who were willing to 
shepherd a section to completion.  And many like me got bogged down 
every time they tried to start.

(It didn't help that people felt compelled to participate in the 
discussions of sections that were completed and up for a vote within a 
week or two - following and participating in controversial discussions 
usually chewed up everyone's available Lojban time, leaving no time or 
energy for writing new sections.  I certainly gave up long ago trying to 
follow Lojban List and doing useful work.  And BPFK work was even more 
intense because of imposed time limits for discussion.)

lojbab

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