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Date: Sun, 25 May 2014 15:03:55 -0400
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update
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On 5/25/2014 2:06 PM, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
>       25 years now, and I never made any effort to learn place
>     structures systematically.
>
> This is a thoughtless retort.

It is a truthful one.

> The suggestion that there is truly no objective sense of efficiency, rhyme or reason to a place structure is
> unmoving.

There may be such a thing, but you have no more access to it than I do. 
  And I have more interesting things to worry about.

>The idea that an efficient place structure has anything to do
> with memorizing gismu systematically doesn't follow.

The idea that I give a damn about either, also doesn't follow.

>     For a language user, rather than a designer, why would you choose to
>     memorize a gismu (place structure) that follows a common pattern but
>     which never actually comes up in your conversation, over a useful
>     brivla where the place structure matters?
>
> Another retort that doesn't connect with the original statement. In fact
> this retort makes zero sense whatsoever. Why would anyone pick a gismu
> that follows a common pattern but never comes up in your conversation?

Back in the day, I picked some 1300 gismu that had never come up in my 
conversation, because no one at that time spoke Lojban.  A large chunk 
of those words were gismu in TLI Loglan, and their initial place 
structures were more or less the same that JCB used, except where we had 
a good reason to change.  But JCB's gismu and place structure choice 
were often quite arbitrary, too.

Efficiency was never a priority.

> This is just not a thought-out reply.

You expect me to spend more time thinking about this stuff than I 
already have?

> You're not even trying.

You are right.

> To suggest that there is no meaningful way to semantically categorize the gismu

I suggest no such thing.  There are lots of ways, but how meaningful 
they are is a subjective question.

> for the utility of helping us
> partition the work, one has to wonder what your actual intention in this
> reply is.

Ridicule?

> Furthermore, the process is democratic

Most of the Lojbanic world isn't involved in your process and won't be.

> and so those associations are completely open to discussion.

Most people have no interest in such a discussion.

>         No.
>
>         First of all, lujvo don't change, since they mean what are
>         defined to mean.
>
>     Who decides what they are defined to mean?

At this point, either the person who uses one, or the person who enters 
it into jbovlaste or some other word collection.

>     In reality, the meaning of lujvo is not and cannot be prescribed.
>
> In reality. Sure, if you say so. Except that we have a dictionary

I have never seen a published Lojban dictionary.  If you refer to 
jbovlaste, it isn't a dictionary, but rather a data base, and I don't 
believe its collection has any official status.

> where
> explicit lujvo place structures are created mindfully and voted on
> democratically.

I have never been aware of, nor involved in, any such vote.  I suspect 
that this is true for most of the community.

>     Or perhaps start using the place you've been skipping - you know:
>     allowing the language to structure the way you think about things.
>       The language was after all originally designed to test the
>     Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
>
>
> This actually made me chuckle out loud. You're not even trying to create
> strong replies

Correct.  selpa'i is hardly worth such an effort, even if I had the time.

> that aim at the content to which you are replying. Use
> places that are not relevant to the speech, just because they come
> earlier in the place structure? What are you even *talking about* Bob?

Maybe we don't speak the same language.

>     Your "semantic groupings" sound very much like your personal natural
>     language conventions.  I rather suspect that a native speaker of a
>     language quite unlike yours would consider different "semantic
>     groupings" more important than yours, and perhaps will find places
>     useful that you prefer to skip, because in their native language,
>     different assumptions about the world have shaped the meaning of words.
>
> Bob, we're not making natlang arguments

Then you aren't talking about language. Lojban will never be recognized 
by real linguists as being a real language, if it doesn't have certain 
traits that they define as necessary.

Maybe you don't care.  Your choice.

> Hubris on our part is one way to look at it. I'll say that hearing this
> critique from someone who has throughout this entire dialog minimized
> and insulted something he cannot even really perceive, being so far
> removed from the life of the daily lojbanist and who cannot even speak a
> dialect of lojban understandable by anyone having learned the language
> in the last 5 years is certainly not going to evoke the any feeling of
> legitimate and genuine criticism in us.

.u'inai .ionai

> What an interesting demonstration is all that one can really think, as
> we know who we are,

You may know, but the rest of us don't.

> To see you attempt this coloring while all the while
> knowing that the very audience you speak to is mostly supportive

Evidence is lacking.

>     in *your* opinion consistent, and in *your* opinion easy to learn.
>       Of course you have no actual basis for that opinion, only some
>     untested assumptions about what sorts of things make learning
>     easier, and place structures more consistent.
>
> This is where you truly show that you have no idea what's going on
> beneath you. You believe that we are simply tinkerers

Yes.  You talk like all the tinkerers before you.

> But the truth is, the IRC community

You are you.  You are not the IRC community.  You speak only for yourself.

> is one of the most active communities Lojban has

Yet no one is ever there most of the times I log in.

(I'm not saying that no one uses IRC; I see a long list of bots logged 
in, but people don't respond to what I say, so I don't bother very often.

> No one buys the "selpa'i and his rag tag IRC community is just a small
> ignorant rebel group looking to destroy the language argument. Ask some
> of the people around you.

selpa'i also is not "the IRC community" and does not have any authority 
to speak for them.

>       and they *won't* have to relearn anything.
>
>     Of course they will.  You think you will be the last person to come
>     along and argue for a new improved gismu list?  This comes up every
>     few years.  And if we ever said "yes" to a single one, we surrender
>     all moral authority to oppose the next dozen attempts.
>
> We're not coming up with anything.

Good.  Then no one has to bother with you.

>     Whoopie.  Anecdotal evidence based on personal experience.  Let me
>     know when a linguistics journal accepts your paper based on that
>     "experience".
>
> This a joke.

I guess I forgot the zo'o

>         and making slight adjustments in gismu place
>         structures results in a big increase in pleasantness of use.
>         This may
>         not be the case for you, but it is for some.
>
>     And why should your personal aesthetics preferences count more than
>     mine?
>
> The process is open for anyone to make arguments for or against the
> proposed changes of others or their own.

There is no process.

>     Sometimes.  And sometimes the semantic experiencer is in x3 or x4 or
>     x5.  And probably in some lujvo, in x8.
>
>     And it is just as fundamental to understanding Lojban conceptually
>     that a beginner be able to cope with an experiencer in x8 as in x1
>     or x2. (Of course a beginner is far less likely to run into such a
>     word these days.)
>
> Only someone who doesn't care about the on-going proliferation of the
> language would say something like this.

Maybe I care rather differently than you, and for different reasons.

>     I am quite aware of the requests of beginners.  I have after all
>     been teaching the language longer than anyone else.  And, I don't
>     reply that way.  If someone is a beginner, I wouldn't be trying to
>     explain the language using gismu that you don't know how to use.
>       Beginners aren't going to be able to use the whole language with
>     facility.
>
> Do you feel that your response actually connects with the content of
> what you're replying to?

I have no idea. selpa'i seldom makes much sense to me.

> That you are disagreeing with the goal of
> having examples justifying the design of every place in the gimste is
> unproductive

We haven't managed the much smaller goal of a set of examples for every 
cmavo.  Why worry about a larger and less important goal?

I don't see any need to "justify the design of every place in the 
gimste".  I can freely admit that many decisions were arbitrary, and 
further I assert that any "justification" is arbitrary.  It simply 
doesn't matter, because gismu are not semantically privileged above 
lujvo, I rather doubt that you expect to justify every place of every lujvo.

> rather than exceedingly legitimizing and of much utility to
> jbopre at any level is astounding, really.

The utility has yet to be seen much less demonstrated.

>     But even ignoring that, if some people want a strongly prescribed
>     language and others do not, we have a fundamentally intractable
>     contradiction, and cannot please everyone.  So we follow the
>     concepts under which the project was started and under which it has
>     survived 25 years
>
> Lojban as language used by actual people, is inevitably a language that
> changes naturally adapting to the needs of the users as those needs
> arise and inspiration provides workable solutions. The idea that lojban
> can ever be truly prescribed can in no way ever be enforced or otherwise
> implemented.

Sounds like what I argued in response to Robin in the discussion cited 
by selpa'i.

I guess you don't really agree with selpa'i

>Any prescription is only useful as a reflection of usage.

Then it is really a *description*, not a prescription.  People can use 
descriptions prescriptively, but that doesn't make them prescriptions.

> In the context of actually having some LLG support this is ironic.

Your support is not in evidence.

>     I can't please your ilk, and I'm not inclined to try, even if I
>     didn't have that LLG members' motion directing me not to do so.
>
>     You got yourself onto the TLI Academy (JCB's likely turning over in
>     his grave about that) - they accept the possibility of prescribing
>     everything.  Good luck over there.
>
> I just can't even begin to understand your disposition.

JCB had a problem with people who challenged authority, shall we say.

>     *You* aren't the "community of users", and you and your friends are
>     only a tiny subset of that community, if what you are using still
>     fits the label "Lojban".  Lojban has stayed alive for many years
>     before you came along, and will stay alive just fine without you,
>     and might even do better, since more people will understand that we
>     aren't going to support or even cooperate with every splinter group
>     that announces itself.
>
> You know what? We are the community of users.

You speak only for yourself until proven otherwise.

> Lojban stays alive in large part BECAUSE of the efforts of this
> community to maintain it from the practical reality and not some
> completely disconnected banal nostalgia of yesteryear's hopeless
> agendas. Ask some people around you if they agree.

Alas, no one around me uses IRC.

I fully respect people who use the language on IRC, for doing so.  But 
they are still not above other Lojbanists who never have done so.

lojbab

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