From sentto-44114-17512-1039009504-lojban-in=lojban.org@returns.groups.yahoo.com Wed Dec 04 05:48:58 2002 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Wed, 04 Dec 2002 05:48:58 -0800 (PST) Received: from n8.grp.scd.yahoo.com ([66.218.66.92]) by digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.05) id 18JZtV-0008Bw-01 for lojban-in@lojban.org; Wed, 04 Dec 2002 05:48:53 -0800 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-44114-17512-1039009504-lojban-in=lojban.org@returns.groups.yahoo.com Received: from [66.218.67.199] by n8.grp.scd.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 04 Dec 2002 13:45:04 -0000 X-Sender: opoudjis@optushome.com.au X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_3_0); 4 Dec 2002 13:45:04 -0000 Received: (qmail 26256 invoked from network); 4 Dec 2002 13:45:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m6.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 4 Dec 2002 13:45:03 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail020.syd.optusnet.com.au) (210.49.20.135) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 4 Dec 2002 13:45:03 -0000 Received: from optushome.com.au (c17180.brasd1.vic.optusnet.com.au [210.49.155.40]) by mail020.syd.optusnet.com.au (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id gB4Dj0Q07230 for ; Thu, 5 Dec 2002 00:45:01 +1100 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Message-Id: <957ADF0C-078E-11D7-9FC7-003065D4EC72@optushome.com.au> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.548) From: Nick Nicholas X-Yahoo-Profile: opoudjis MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list lojban@yahoogroups.com; contact lojban-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list lojban@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 00:45:00 +1100 Subject: [lojban] Baseline statement Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-archive-position: 3005 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: opoudjis@optushome.com.au Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list People, please get a grip. (This includes me, I know. But still.) People are allowed to express dissent. People are allowed to call for the statement to be voted down. This doesn't mean they are evil or obstructionist. It is possible to object out of concern for the direction the language is taking; it is also possible to be in the minority in this opinion. It especially saddens me to see that this whole blow-up started so innocuously last week. (.i ta'o mi na birti ledu'u su'o da pu ritli rinsa la ctefan. ca'o lenu cmima le jboste cecmu .i fi'i ctefan. .i .a'o do na xanku ki'u lepu'u darlu .i ri se ckaji le cecmu) Also, calling for broader input on the statement than a vote is legit; if a non-trivial number of Lojbanists feel we should try and convoke a special meeting on this, then that's certainly an option worth considering. Likewise, if the board needs to make statements of clarification or expansion, let it. Yes, the board is trusted with day to day running, but if the board was collectively possessed by aliens, and said tomorrow Lojbanists must all switch to Solresol immediately, I think some here would want the opportunity to get a broader vote on the proposal before July... So. On the specifics that have been brought up since the publication of the statement, that I haven't already spoken about -- and some that I have. I will differentiate my board member persona from my opinion on BPFK matters --- on which I can claim authority, but regard that authority as suspended until the vote is passed. 1. On Pierre's requests. I've already said my opinion; we can look at anything, with some reluctance. That said, I have no reason to believe the sky will fall in if we include a page *clarifying* morphology issues (as opposed to altering the CLL statement outright), either as a CLL addendum or in an appendix to the dictionary. As Bob said, that's not in the BPFK's brief, but I think it can take it up. We might need board approval, though. That said, Pierre has convinced me there's an issue. And Lionel, 3-4 months is not at all an inordinate delay, and I don't think we'll be deluged with requests on this. Feel free to put your name down for this. 2. Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 13:01:17 -0500 From: Robert LeChevalier Subject: Re: Re: [llg-members] Official Statement- LLG Board approves new baseline policy > At 08:20 AM 11/29/02 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote: >> I don't use the TLI alternate orthography, so when I write {srutio}, >> I don't >> mean {sruti'o}. > > But if srutio is a valid word, then it has to be usable by those who > DO you > the alternate orthography. Not an argument. That's the alternate orthography's problem; /srutiho/ is certainly a distinct string phonologically than /srutio/ as far as Lojban is concerned, and it's specious to say otherwise. (And after the recent kerfuffle, you should know well that arguments for Loglan compatibility can backfire. :-) Pierre's responded to this well anyway. What on earth is the status of the alternate orthography, anyway, that it should constrain Lojban phonotactics? --- I always thought it was as unofficial as the Tengwar and Estrangela orthographies. And it is mentioned in the same breath as Tengwar in CLL --- and under the heading "oddball orthographies". Exigencies of the Loglan orthography constrain Lojban no more than exigencies of the Cyrillic orthography: fix the orthography, not the language. Give me a statement in the present baseline that explicitly says the Loglan orthography is more important than the Cyrillic in deciding what are allowed word shapes. Your aesthetic judgement on srutio is no more binding on this issue than And's aesthetic distaste of apostrophes. (And provide a language-internal argument, please; if the issue truly is rapproachment, I dunno, Loglanise srutio as srutiò or something. It's not like there's that many such strings to begin with.) And I find it incredible that anyone with any sense of Lojban will hear IPA [srutjo] and think that's a lujvo. [tj]? That ain't Lojban. You don't get a more clear signal of fu'ivla-hood. (Or are you going to go back to the primacy of writing --- and you an unabashed evolutionist!) 3. And. Reiterating: A1. The phonotactics of experimental cmavo will be determined by the BPFK; it will not be decided beforehand. Both Bob and I envision expanding and contracting experimental cmavo space as being within the ambit of the BPFK; it does involve a techfix to CLL, but if it becomes demonstrably necessary, then we'd be churlish to refuse. I just don't feel qualified to make such a determination right now, before everyone's gone through what will be seriously proposed and considered, and we know what numbers we're looking at. Likewise, I see no point in determining right now whether experimental cmavo space expands into xVV or CV'V'V first. Right now, both xVV and CV'V'V are equally experimental, and there is no baseline reason making official xVV any less or more a disruption than official CV'V'V. Making xVV official first is Bob's opinion, and it's what we'd always assumed we'd do. But I do not regard that opinion as binding. You and Jordan have raised alternatives worth considering; and we'll consider them. A2. Splitting problematic cmavo into two official cmavo, one old and one new, is certainly one approach the BPFK can consider. It is not the only approach, and although you and Bob both favour it, it is not in fact my favoured approach. A3-4. I am reluctant, for political reasons, to say that the set of cmavo shall remain open-ended. Nothing is preventing new cmavo becoming (a) official, if there is still a post-baseline body conferring officialness, or (b) de facto standard, if there is not. I understand that the constraints on cmavo space, and the stigma of experimental cmavo, make it desirable to expand official cmavo space now. I am sympathetic to this, but will not make any decision on my own, or before the BPFK is working. If the language goes feral naturalist, there will be no experimental/official distinction. If the language stays prescriptivist, then cmavo space can be expanded by later bodies. This latter possibility will be made easier by granting reasonable cmavo space, I agree; but this discussion can be deferred. B1-4. Lojban may get concise, it may not. Preserving its syntax in recognisable form means it won't get very concise. And the way natural languages attain concision will make a mockery of Lojban phonotactics anyway. The God Zipf may or may not hold sway over the community in the years to come; but as has been rightly pointed out, we cannot sacrifice current stability for a God to come. I favour Jordan's gradualist solution --- assigning double cmavo for known-to-be-dumb assignments, deprecating but not abolishing the old use; but again, this can be deferred until the BPFK considers cmavo in their entirety. B5. I have always and always will feel that Lojban cannot and should not evolve 'naturally' --- and that Bob's proclamation of natural evolution has been a naive blunder that has compromised the formalist aims for the project (as opposed to his aims, which I have always considered eccentric.) But it's fact now, and we are dealing with a community coloured by this 'blunder'. No Change Without Consensus will not fly, IMO. Even allowing for the continuing existence of a BPFK-like body after the baseline (the Academy, in effect), was a major concession to extract; and I'm not sure it will in fact happen. But to switch to a prescriptivist future for Lojban, desirable or not, is not realistic, and not I believe legitimate grounds to reject the statement. The statement after all is an amplification of previous thinking (however misguided), not a repudiation. C. And is advocating tighter semantics. I have advocated it --- though rarely practiced it. Lojban cannot be held to as tight semantic criteria as syntactic, because the semantics will simply not get formalised to a comparable level --- certainly not a statement of the semantics which will reach community consensus, as we intend the dictionary to be. It is clear to me that saying {pa} and meaning {re} is as much a violation of the Baseline as it stands (which does include semantics, even if elementally), as it is to say {le nanmu joi le ninmu}. And if I were to class which error is more pernicious, believe me, it wouldn't be the quirk of LALR parsing. Your intent, I take it, is to force the community to pay more attention to getting semantics right. I agree, and enough Lojbanists do that the BPFK will come into being. If the current state of semantic specification were felt to be acceptable, people wouldn't want a 'dictionary'; they'd be happy with a pretty-printed version of the current wordlists. (Going into the board meeting, that's all I thought we'd be doing, actually; the turn has been surprising.) But realistically, I do not expect a very formal semantics to arise out of this. More formal than what's currently there, sure. But not enough to satisfy either of us --- because it has to satisfy everyone else, too. If you want a clausule saying that baseline compliance is not simply a matter of running Lojban text through a parser; we also need to make sure that the words are used in a standard way, well, sure, that's legit. But if anyone out there truly thinks running Lojban text through a parser is in itself a proof of baseline compliance, they're being doofuses. This-all is not ex cathedra, because I fear some of you may be such doofuses. :-) But it certainly is my opinion, and I'm surprised it's controversial. We will need to ensure the semantic prescription is minimal enough to keep it uncontroversial. People can restrict the semantics further in their own works and on their own time; but the LLG dictionary, as a statement of standard Lojban, has to be acceptable to everyone. (Hence my 'watering down' approach to debate.) D. Good thing you don't feel strongly about abolishing unintelligible cmavo. I do: I regard it as an intolerable baseline breaking. cmavo can only be nuked with overwhelming support, and I'd say when external factors make them nukable. I think Bob's example of duelling character standards cmavo is about the only good instance. I'm not ruling out nuking; but it would have to be held to an exceedingly high standard. Much higher than what Bob did with the rafsi. 4. Jordan's response (Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 19:10:10 -0600 Subject: Re: Comments on the New Policy) gismu space is much more open, and later lojbanists may add gismu. I don't envision us doing so now, and my own bias is strongly weighted towards lujvo instead. But I would not want to rule out any non-destructive change in the language 10 years from now; it's post-freeze, we don't know how the decision making will work then, we aren't running out of gismu space as we are cmavo space. So this is a non-issue, and it's good that noone is making it an issue. 5. Bob's exchanges with And I'm not getting into this. I feel somewhat more affinity with And's position than Bob's, as people will have divined by now, but if I get into this I will end up screaming, and this benefits noone. 6. Other dissent. Jorge, what were your objections to the freezes, and particularly the seals of approval? I'm not saying it to water the proposals down (you won't be surprised to hear my reaction to your definition of {xruti}), but since we may collide heads over this policy later, I am interested in hearing what your concerns are, at least to enable us to state the policy more explicitly. 7. Loglan I got upset over this, which is my bad. I don't recant, but I note that And's concrete proposal is a lot more constructive than anything anyone else has had had to say on the topic, and ask Bob to consider it for action. 8. gismu I recognise there are broken gismu, and the BPFK should clean them up. My current understanding of cleaning up gismu is, disambiguate ambiguous or ill-defined places. It does not extend to adding or deleting places. That's a bottomless pit, and we went through it 8 years ago. We will not, in my opinion, go through gismu one by one. But if anyone has considered a definition problematic --- as Avital, Jorge, and I have brought up in the past year --- then the BPFK can consider it. Again, this exceeds the current brief slightly in the letter, but I believe it is consistent with its spirit. We might need board permission, though, as with the morphology clarification. 9. Jordan's ma'ei Hm. If mu'ei is adopted, I would want it readily expanded to different logics, but I don't want a different cmavo for each one. Maybe ma'ai mi'ei mu'ei, mu'ai xi vo, with the modality of each stated metalinguistically (we already can use metalinguistic tags to disambiguate mex operators.) But that's getting ahead of myself... [Nick Nicholas. French & Italian Studies, University of Melbourne ] [ nickn@unimelb.edu.au http://www.opoudjis.net ] [There is no theory of language structure so ill-founded that it cannot] [be the basis for some successful Machine Translation. --- Yorick Wilks] To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/