Return-Path: Message-Id: <9111020717.AA05786@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Sun Nov 3 06:56:58 1991 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Dialog with Bob McIvor on Loglan - part 1 of 2 (long) X-To: 70674.1215@compuserve.com X-Cc: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Sun Nov 3 06:56:58 1991 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN 70674.1215@compuserve.com Wed Oct 30 11:59:08 1991: >John Ross has sent me copies of comments by Bob LeChevalier on issues >discussed in Lognet(TM), which were submitted to the conlang forum. I >would like to enlarge on some of his comments, which do not, in my >opinion, correctly express the views of The Loglan Institute. Thank you for responding, RAM. I much prefer dialog. I do question whether TLI has monolithic 'views', unless it is by definition that of JCB. When I comment, I do so on the basis of my understanding of his views. The following is extremely critical of your comments in the referenced message. I think you are taking an insider's view as to what is appearing in print, and missing the obvious implications of what is being said. I would prefer that my comments be taken constructively, and not as an attack on you or TLI per se (to the extent I may trash TLI's current design of the language, you may take my statements as being what I feel are reasoned criticisms, each of which we have resolved for Lojban.) I note in advance that there is an apology embedded before for a couple of mistakes I made that you legitimately criticized me for. Thank you for being gentle in correcting me. I alas, am not as skilled in gentile criticism. But I'm trying. In spite of its great length and occasionally intricate detail, I am posting the whole thing to conlang a) to respond completely and analytically to your points and b) because while the details may be irrelevant to those not interested in Loglan in particular, the discussion clearly points out many issues that a conlang inventor had better take into consideration, as well as the range of philosophies that can exist between two conlang workers that think they are working on the same language, and at my last understanding, respect each other highly. I am also copying this to the Lojban List, for the edification of many there not on conlang. This is a far more reasoned discussion than the flame exchange with Steve Rice in June. ______ >As is apparently the situation with Lojban, case tags are being actively >studied at the moment, with a view to clarifying their role in the >language. None of the opinions expressed in Lognet should therefore be >taken as gospel, and I welcome any insights on this problem which might >be contributed by the Lojban group. There has been recent debate case tags in conlangs in general, and some debate vis a vis Lojban, but we rejected case tags a couple of years ago after pc did an indepth study. The conclusion: linguists cannot agree on any set of cases as being necessary or sufficient for language, and one group of researchers actively working with cases is gaining some success with the effective assumption that there is no finite set of cases. We generalized from that and realized that ANY set of cases if treated as cases per se, imposes a metaphysical bias - a no no according to JCB's assumptions. The argument: if two places of the same or a different predicate have the same case tag, that common case tag implies the existence a second predicate relation between the two equivalently tagged places, specifically that they have the same (or essentially similar) role in their respective relations. It seems inherently likely therefore, that someone will come to identify all 'actors' as having something inherently in common, likewise all 'sources', etc. (I recognize that this commonalty may be poorly identified by the 'name' of the tag, but strongly suspect that it would color the interpretation of that common predicate. It is all well and good to overtly claim that a 'child' is a product of either parental relationship, but to equate this with the 'product' of 'madzo' make and other 'products' imposes an equivalence that may be desired by a speaker, but not necessarily by all speakers. The same thing results in standard prepositional languages that share the same preposition. An English speaker, I argue without proof, subconsciously assumes some similarity among all objects which are linked to their verb by the preposition 'to', likewise for 'of' (in the latter case, possession). But what if you wish to claim the relationship 'matma' WITHOUT implying that the child is in some way a 'product', and the mother a 'source' (personally I would consider the egg and sperm equally 'the source' of a child, and hence ultimately both parents, and feel it is sexist to imply otherwise). If you argue that leaving the case tags off removes this implication, I respond that they are inherently being included as part of the definition of the words. The result is that predicates can be semantically classified by the cases that they relate. All predicates with the same cases on their arguments are arguably the same in some semantic sense. You have thus subdivided predicates into semantic categories, and I argue that that is incompatible with a predicate language, where 'predicate' is defined in its logical sense. The alternative is hinted at by James Jennings in the new Lognet, where he proposes that all 1 place predicates have the B case on their single case, using the argument of the universal grammatical role of the predicate. Alas, he does not carry this to its logical conclusion: that all 2 place predicates should have the same case tag for their x1 place and the same case tag for their x2 place, and the same for three place predicates, etc. Any other classification violates the 'universal grammatical role' assumption. The only remaining argument is whether the case tag for x1 of a 1 place predicate should be the same as the x1 place of a 2 place predicate; i.e. whether the sets of case tags should overlap those of other-number-of-argument predicates. If that were not so, each separate set would be a different selma'o (grameme*), because it would never be valid to put a 1-place case tag on a 2-place predicate. Now JCB has in the past rejected a grammatical division of predicates by numbers of arguments, and I would be surprised if such a division has crept back in during the trade secret period. The result is that case tags are only needed to number the places, and the Hixson-Bonewitz numbering tags (FA series for Lojbanists) are the necessary and sufficient set. _____ *I urge you to start the ball rolling within the TLI community to correct the mis-terminology of JCB's use of 'lexeme', as we are hurriedly trying to do. All of Loglan is hurt by it. Suffix '-eme' refers to the smallest significant distinction of its prefix morpheme. 'Lexeme' is thus a word unit as seen by your parser (le, po, and lepo are TLI version lexemes, not LE, PO, and LEPO). Your 'lexer' thus categorizes 'lexemes' into 'gramemes'. (In YACC parlance, I believe a 'lexer' is something that breaks down the input stream into 'tokens', which are the word-units or lexemes. Loglan parsers do the extra step of classifying 'gramemes' that is not applicable to most computer languages, since their grammar rules include the final step of enumerating all the words that are equivalent for each rule, making 'lexeme' and 'grameme' effectively identical. This is NOT true for Loglan, and virtually every professional linguist has called us on it. _____ Instead of case tags, Lojban has generalized the other set of semantic tags that JCB calls relative modal operators (Lojban BAI), and incorporated the causals in this set (but keeps them separate from the rest of the tenses, for which we have a full and detailed grammar). To incorporate the causals, we made it so that all relative modal operators can be 'converted' in the same way that the TLI causals can with NU and NOI (Lojban SE and NAI). As the relative modal operators are loosely associated with certain prims (gismu) that suggest their meaning, so are Lojban BAI words. But you use the appropriate conversion to access the place that you want. Thus Lojban pilno (x1 uses x2 for x3) gives rise to "pi'o", and then "sepi'o" gives semantic reference to the x2 place of "pilno", thus roughly equating to the preposition "using ...", or the instrumental/tool case. The linkage in meaning is somewhat metaphorical, as are the relative modal operators. The linkage to prims and their place structures makes a much larger set memorizable. We have some 60 BAI tags, but with conversion, that is probably over 150 meaningful 'cases'. But we also provide a mechanism for converting any predicate into a BAI equivalent, so our set of potential 'cases' is indeed infinite to match the most liberal case theory. Unlike JCB, we do not ban these operators from the numbe [rest of message lost? - Robin Lee Powell - Feb 2010]