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Date: Sun, 25 May 2014 06:28:00 -0400
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update
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 Content preview:  On 5/24/2014 4:46 PM, selpa'i wrote: > With the gimste revision
    hopefully about to begin, I'd like to introduce > you to some goals of this
    project as well as present a simple outline of > how I hope we're going to
    accomplish those goals. > > For ease of learning and for aesthetic reasons
    the gimste should be > > 1. As interally consistent as possible > 2. As simple
    as possible [...] 
 
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On 5/24/2014 4:46 PM, selpa'i wrote:
> With the gimste revision hopefully about to begin, I'd like to introduce
> you to some goals of this project as well as present a simple outline of
> how I hope we're going to accomplish those goals.
>
> For ease of learning and for aesthetic reasons the gimste should be
>
> 1. As interally consistent as possible
> 2. As simple as possible

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin...

> Lojban is marketed as "simple and easy to learn".

By the standards of languages, it is.  Of course, in point of fact, if 
you are trying to learn Lojban to a level of fluency that requires 30000 
distinct concepts to be labeled clearly (i.e 30000 brivla with known 
place structures), you probably won't find that to be "easy", no matter 
how regular the lists are.

> The gimste contains certain elements which seem to contradict that claim,

It doesn't  If the claim was that Lojban constitutes the simplest 
possible language to learn, that claim might have an argument.  But even 
then "seem to" makes the claim trite and subjective.

The gimste is a small subset if all brivla, more important now while the 
language is growing than it will be when most skilled Lojbanists know 
far more lujvo than they do gismu.

> as lots of gismu are bloated,

another ill-defined and subjective claim.

>and lots of gismu contain surprising

so what?

>and irregular sumti places.

Likewise, so what.

It was never a goal of the language to have no words that are 
surprising, nor to have all words constrained by a straitjacket of 
"consistency" according to ad hoc criteria.

Even if you could achieve the goal of a perfectly regular and consistent 
and non-bloated gismu list, your perfection is sullied by the first 
lujvo that uses a semantically unusual tanru (like some of the oddball 
examples in the chapter of CLL describing lujvo metaphors), or a nonce 
fu'ivla borrowing, which has whatever places the person borrowing 
chooses to have.

Meanwhile, the very first change you make to the existing gismu list, no 
matter how regularizing it may seem inherently makes the language HARDER 
to learn because you have potentially invalidated all prior use of that 
gismu both as an individual words and as a component in a lujvo  You 
have made someone who knew that gismu less knowledgeable (and whether 
you have experienced it or not, the relearning of language changes is 
among the more difficult parts of learning a new language.

> The simpler and the more consistent the gimste, the higher are the
> chances for the average person to learn Lojban  and the more pleasant it
> is to be a user of this language, I believe.

Those claims are merely that: claims.  Unsupported by actual evidence. 
They thus rank somewhat less certain than the claim that the gismu 
construction algorithm with its meticulous scoring of phonemes, makes 
the language easier to learn for learners from the source languages. 
JCB did at one time conduct research on this, although the experiment 
was poorly reported and had methodological flaws.  Someday a more 
rigorous test can be devised and conducted.  But will it really matter, 
if someone finds that a different algorithm might have made the words 
10% or 20% easier to learn?

> The gimste should also be expressive,

Another claim regarding a subjectively measured property.

> but not at the cost of cramming in
> countless places just for the sake of having more places per gismu.

Anyone who thinks that places were "crammed in just for the sake of 
having more places" is utterly clueless about how the language was 
developed.

Throughout the language development era, there has been tension between 
those who wanted to minimize the number of places, and those who wanted 
to maximize "expressiveness" or more importantly "usefulness in making 
lujvo" which was a more important criterion than "simplicity".

> That's not something that adds expressiveness.

Depends on the definition of that term.

> Global proposals are those that pertain to the whole gimste as a whole.
> This is where general questions, such as "should we remove the "under
> conditions" places?" are discussed. Anything that can be applied to
> multiple gismu at once falls under this category. This has the advantage
> that we don't have to discuss the same things again and again for each
> gismu we consider.

Excepting of course that whether or not an "under conditions" place is 
necessary is NOT a global question.  Whether a substance is a gas, a 
liquid, or a solid, is strongly dependent on the "under conditions"

> Individual gismu proposals then look at each gismu individually. Here,
> the special characteristics of each gismu can be analyzed. Superfluous
> or irregular places can be adjusted or removed and missing places can be
> added. Examples of likely-superfluous places would be the x3 of {tirxu}
> or the completely unweildy definition of {santa}.

To some, tiger-ness requires stripes on the coat.  But we have included 
jaguars and leopards that don't have stripes.  A different gismu might 
have left-off non-striped big cats, which would have been
"simpler" except for someone who wants to talk about leopards.  And yet, 
even while recognizing that not all big cats and therefore tirxu have 
the same coating, the concept of a tiger is also used metaphorically in 
many ways, including one which depends on the stripiness of the coat. 
Usage, and not prescription, is the only proper way to decide how to 
resolve that conflict.

santa similar has its place structure for historical reasons, ones which 
were complicated when people successfully argued to "simplify" the gismu 
list by eliminating "gumri" which was "mushroom" and thus a number of 
useful metaphors found in other languages.  So instead we now have santa 
mledi, and it was a santa dilnu over Hiroshima some 70 years ago, 
neither of which satisfies a lot of people, and made even more 
problematical by the place structure.  But of course at that time there 
was no attempt to devise rules for place structures of lujvo based on 
their source gismu.

History has made the language what it is.  Someone ignorant of that 
history, and the full range of criteria that went into making such 
decisions is not qualified for "remaking the gismu list" UNLESS they are 
trying to invent a new and different language.

On bit of knowledge would be that the sort of review of the gismu list 
as a whole that you describe has been done at least 3 times that I know 
of, back before we baselined the gismu list and every single review was 
found unsatisfactory by those who had someone different criteria and 
priorities.  What makes your groups particular priorities more important 
than any others, encompassing those of 25 years of Lojbanists.

> The point of this revision is, again, to make the gimste internally
> consistent and thus easier to learn for newcomers as well as easier to
> use for people already reasonably fluent.

NO change makes the language "easier" for someone fluent.  Language 
change requires relearning, which is not easy (some 20+ years later, 
Nora and I still occasionally throw a nonexistent gumri into our usage, 
and more often waste time because we remember it isn't a word and try to 
figure out whether and how to use santa and/or mledi in its place

> For the second step it makes sense to proceed not in alphabetical order
> but by semantic groupings.

We found also that Roget's thesaurus concepts work nicely for 
non-predicate languages.  Alas, all of that analysis was based on the 
meaning of x1 of the various gismu, which in a way invalidates the 
analysis.  Try doing a semantic grouping of the gismu based on the x2 of 
each word and you find that the semantic groupings will be quite 
different from those based on x1.

And it is important that this be so, because too much semantic emphasis 
on the x1 risks losing the predicate nature of the language.

> That way it becomes much easier to get related gismu to align.

All gismu are "related".

Why should some "align", and not others

>For example, all the gismu about emotional states could go together.

They could.  But what about the words that you don't recognize to be 
about emotional states

>We have a few such gismu categorizations we can use as a basis.

And by definition, NONE of those categorizations is completely valid, 
because no one has devised a categorization scheme that encompasses both 
the semantic meaning of x1 and that of all the other places which are in 
theory equally important to the gismu semantics.

> As part of the revision, I would also like to define each gismu well
> enough that we can come up with examples filling *every* sumti place of
> every gismu.

That would be an interesting but probably unproductive challenge.

> Currently there are certain sumti places which nobody
> really knows how to fill.

The first time someone fills it, they will know.

>If we can't fill a place or don't understand it, it has no reason to exist,

Absolutely incorrect.

And you can always fill a place.  Many people have no clue about the 
nuances of epistemology, and even those who do know them may be hard 
pressed to come up with an expression to fill the x4 of djuno.  And yet 
knowledge does require an epistemology, even if you don't know what that 
is.  And you can "fill the place" x4 with "zo'e" or even le/lo ve djuno.

 > so we should either figure out what it means

Worthwhile goal, but not a very high priority one when we have cmavo 
that people haven't figured out.

> and how it's used

It is used however people use it.

> or remove it. At the end of all this, we will have a shiny list of gismu,

and a schism in the language.

> along with plenty of example sentences that
> anyone having questions about how to use a certain gismu can simply look
> up and learn from.

Except of course that they won't.

A more useful effort on the gismu list would be to come up with new 
definitions, trying NOT to change any place structures, but also not 
constrained by the fixed length field of the baseline list (which of 
course was originally designed to be the input to a flash card program, 
and not a statement of a baseline.)

> It is my belief that this will be an invaluable aid for learners

I am uninterested in your religion.

> and that the project as a whole will increase Lojban's attractiveness.

To whom.

>(afterall, one of its advertised selling points is that
> it is free of exceptions, and I don't think we should lie to people)

Then don't, since that is not an accurate statement of any selling 
point.  These are the points in the introductory brochure, of which two 
are relevant:

> There are many artificial languages, but Loglan/Lojban has been engineered to make it unique in several ways. The following are the main features of Lojban:
>
>     Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
>     Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
>     Lojban grammar is based on the principles of logic.
>     Lojban has an unambiguous grammar.
>     Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.
>     Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
>     Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
>     Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.
>     Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
>     Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.

"simple compared to natural languages".  Not "simple" in the absolute 
sense, whatever that means.

"the rules of the language are without exception"  There are no rules of 
the language which dictate what sort of places go into place structures. 
  The closest we can come to such a rule would be that place structures 
are inviolate - not filling a brivla place doesn't eliminate that place 
from the meaning of the brivla (nor does not knowing what sort of thing 
properly goes into that place).  But changing the place structure of a 
word by prescriptive decree, which is what your group wants to do, 
arguable DOES violate this marketing point.  If the rules of the 
language change AT ALL, then the rules are not without exception in the 
time-free sense (and Lojban is of course tense-optional).

Of course, since the language is intended to "go feral" and cease to be 
under prescriptive control, it can be argued that we already have 
conceded that time-free sense in incorrect.  Or perhaps any apparent 
rule which does change through usage is therefore not-a-rule.  In which 
case we may never know "the rules of the language" as long as there are 
Lojban users.  (This tension may indicate why many Lojbanists like the 
idea of the community deciding what the language is through usage, while 
at the same time want a perpetual BPFK around to codify usage questions 
prescriptively (which is arguably exactly the opposite of community 
decision.)

lojbab

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