Return-Path: Message-Id: <9208211642.AA09196@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Fri Aug 21 16:43:53 1992 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: report on LogFest 92 X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Fri Aug 21 16:43:53 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!cuvmb.bitnet!LOJBAN This is a report on LogFest 92, which took place the weekend of 14-17 August 1992, and included the annual meeting of LLG. 16 people attended. As usual, Friday night was arrival night, with socializing and people coming in the door until well after midnight. Lojban-related activities started on Saturday and continued through Monday, though most people left on Sunday night and Monday morning. On Saturday, the Lojban community welcomed the return of Athelstan, who was able to attend for a few hours with the assistance of his parents, who are helping him out in his recovery from February's auto accident. It will be a while yet before Athelstan can resume the major contributions to the Lojban effort that he was making before the accident, but having him show up at LogFest was a real morale booster for us, and probably also for him. Athelstan was able to stay and serve as 'critic' while the summer '92 DC Lojban class and John Cowan helped present Nora's operettina "le ci cribe", for lojbo verba of all ages. As with the previous effort of this kind, Cinderelwood (1989), our low budget, low practice, production group set a new standard for lojbo draci, but aren't about to hit Broadway in the near future. The Lojbanic lyrics went well with the collections of children's songs to which the playlet was set, and some hasty but serious practice efforts before the presentation meant that the actors sang their lines without stumbling. Athelstan the critic gave it a thumbs up before departing; we'll be looking forward to his next visit. Another major activity on Saturday was the discussion of the Lojban Kalevala project, about which I've reported separately. All in all, we tried to keep Saturday a little bit light, knowing that Sunday's business meeting was likely to be long and emotionally draining. Thus, discussions stayed in English, and ranged over a wide variety of topics related to the Lojban effort. TLI Business meeting The business meeting started at 9:30AM Sunday morning. We had several key people missing, as pc had business matters in Arizona to take care of, John Hodges' car broke down at the last minute, and Art Wieners was called back to work from vacation for a crisis that made him unavailable all weekend. However, all of these people had made their positions clear on the issues at hand, and the meeting proceeded surprising well. The following summarizes the results of the meeting: Organizational Nick Nicholas and Colin Fine were elected as the first non-US voting members of LLG. We consider all of the Lojban community to be part of LLG, but he have to have a clearly defined voting membership for legal purposes to manage organizational matters. Also added were David Young, Sylvia Rutiser, and David Twery. Jeff Taylor, who hasn't actively participated for the last couple of years, was dropped as a voting member. To make clear the nature of voting membership, a resolution was passed explicitly stating on the record that voting members should consider themselves as representing the community at-large, and not just themselves, in matters that are decided. Several bylaw changes were made, all relating to procedures involved in holding members' and Board of Directors' meetings when we are so geographically dispersed and several members cannot be physically present for the meeting, especially the overseas members; we do not want inability to attend LogFest to prevent people from participating in the LLG decision-making, especially such major technical contributors as Nick and Colin. These bylaw changes are an evolving process, as we adapt to LLG's continuing growth and international spread; every year, we seem to need a few more changes to meet new problems that have arisen. Copies of the current LLG Bylaws are available at cost to any member of the community. Bob and Nora LeChevalier, John Cowan, and pc were re-elected to the LLG Board of Directors, and in a brief meeting of the Board after the members' meeting, Bob was reelected President of LLG, pc as Vice President, and Nora as Secretary/Treasurer. Negotiation with TLI The major political issue was the determination of LLG policy towards The Loglan Institute and JCB, now that the legal battle is over. There have been some initial efforts towards a negotiation between the two groups, with both sides expressing an interest in reuniting the effort behind a single version of the language. Of course, the commonalty doesn't go much further, as TLI wants LLG to disband and merge into TLI behind its version of Loglan, while LLG is committed to Lojban, which is a much superior version of the language, and has a larger group of people actually doing something with the language. The LLG membership showed extreme distrust towards TLI, and voted to insist on two key preconditions to further negotiations: a) Both organizations must sign a binding agreement preventing legal action resulting from further negotiations; the members want to make sure that TLI's offers to negotiate are bona fide and not an attempt to set us up for a lawsuit. b) TLI must drop its 'trade secret' protection on all aspects of its design for its version of the language. LLG being committed to the freedom of the Loglan community to freely use the language howsoever they choose, the members felt that a 'secret' grammar is anathema to the concept of a large community of people using a constructed language, especially one intended for scientific research. It is felt that no real progress can be made on possible merger of the two languages while TLI continued to keep theirs secret where neither TLI nor LLG supporters could see the language details and evaluate them on their merits. The general bent of the membership was to be open to negotiations provided that TLI demonstrated bona fide intent by meeting the preconditions, but there is little sentiment for allowing significant changes in Lojban as part of a merger of languages; we collectively believe that the Lojban design is far superior to anything the TLI designers might have come up with in the past couple of years since the last good information about their flawed version of the language. I proposed a strategy for remerger of the efforts starting with the adoption of alternative ways of writing the two language versions so that they resemble each other in appearance, thus making cosmetic appearance not an issue (as it appears to be for JCB) when the two languages are essentially the same in the structures that determine how the language looks on paper. John Cowan posted on this list a couple of months ago an alternate orthography for Loglan/Lojban allowing it to look in print very much like TLI Loglan. Following such an initial step, each organization would study in depth the two language versions looking for similarities and differences. We would try to convince TLI to adopt our changes into their language, and they presumably would try to convince us to adopt their design where we differ. Vocabulary lists are likely to be the major unresolvable issue under this approach. When the review is completed, the decision of which vocabulary list and which version of any unresolved differences to go with would be put to a vote of the supporters of each version. If one version wins the vote in both organizations, then the language versions have remerged. Otherwise, the two organizations go there separate ways, but with languages presumably much closer together. It is the collective belief of the LLG membership that if no merger takes place, that TLI will fade away eventually when JCB dies (he is 71 years old), since he is the only real force holding that organization together both organizationally and financially. Most LLG members have expressed an unwillingness to accept any changes in Lojban that in any way detract from the current design - any evolution of Lojban would have to be a positive one, and we have no reason to believe that there are any differences between the two languages wherein changing Lojban to match TLI Loglan would enhance the language. As such, faced with lengthy negotiations even if TLI meets our necessary preconditions, the membership reiterated its intent that we publish the books defining the Lojban design that are currently in preparation, noting that as each book is published it will further cement us in a position wherein we cannot accept changes to the language in concession to TLI. Thus the ball is in TLI's court and they will have to move fast if they wish to have any significant chance of influencing the direction of a future combined effort. Forthcoming Books There was lengthy and emotional debate on the continuing delays in getting the baseline books out. All the good excuses in the world do not ameliorate the fact that many Lojbanists are waiting for the books, convinced either that they cannot learn the language without the books, or that the language will change on them after they've learned it, if they learn the language before it is set down in the books. Our very conservative baseline approach does not satisfy the latter people; only the books will do. The membership thus forced John Cowan and me to more strongly commit to getting the books done as quickly as possible, and to avoid changes to the language definition except insofar as glitches come to light during book writing. We expect to have the proto-dictionary done before the end of the year, with the proto-textbook and introductory book following soon after. John Cowan's papers will be assembled into a reference grammar to conclude the initial design documents. We are trying to have all 4 books done within a year, though John's book will be the slowest to be completed. John believes that after these books are completed, there will likely be no further changes to the language, and we will go immediately into the long-term design-ending baseline. I continue to intend to produce a real textbook and dictionary (of which the first two books are indeed 'prototypes') that will define the baseline, but even John doubts that this will happen in a timely manner, and that the proto-books will be the ones used in the baseline. I have agreed that the bottom line on the book publication will be how fast we can get them written, coupled with the finances of publishing, and not my goals to produce more 'perfect' non-proto versions of the books. This, and a renewed commitment to stop fiddling with the language design, mollified some very frustrated and impatient Lojban supporters. The conclusion, as I've tried to make it clear many times before, is that the community very strongly wants the language to be DONE, and USABLE, and does not care whether the language is any closer to PERFECT than it currently is. I stand on record as recognizing that sentiment of the community as expressed by the membership, that has elected me to lead the effort. Baseline Status/Language Design The membership voted to update the grammar baseline as of the proto-dictionary publication, to include changes approved by the technical committee that has been reviewing those changes (which are all considered relatively minor by the members). The rafsi and cmavo lists will also be baselined when the book is published, incorporating the current reviews, and the intent is to baseline the morphology algorithm published in JL16, though John Cowan wants to have the algorithm coded and verified before making such a commitment. With all of these baselines, the only significant language feature that will not be baselined are the gismu place structures, although it is believed that the simple fact of putting those into the book will effectively baseline them as well (the difference to me is that I don't want to feel obligated to defend a stupidity that we missed in the place structure simply because we made a promise not to change. There are known weaknesses in other aspects of the Lojban design, but they are NOT considered open for change because of our baseline commitment to avoid change where possible. The two gismu proposed in JL16, vukro and slovo, were added to the gismu baseline, along with four new gismu for metric prefixes reflecting their addition to the international metric standard. As part of the rafsi review, there emerged strong feeling that the gismu for "daytime" as distinct from "day" (= 24 hours) should have good rafsi, which was not possible without severe tradeoffs given the word (dinri) that resulted when the word was generated last year using the word-making algorithm. As was done in the case of "less than", which was changed from "ckamu" to "mleca" because of the need for a good rafsi, the membership approved that this word be chaged, disregarding the scoring algorithm if necessary. This was considered acceptable only because the word is a new one added just last year and is neither in common use yet nor even reflected in our published lists. To minimize relearning difficulty, John Cowan and I opted to change only a single letter, and the gismu for 'daytime' is now "donri", with rafsi dor and do'i. The membership approved this change. That was it for the members meeting. We also had two committee meetings, one to correlate and decide the results of the rafsi review, based on comments received from my posting a couple of weeks ago, and the other to allocate the $142 received last winter in donations specifically to support active, non-paying Lojbanists who cannot afford to pay for materials. The money was allocated toward 2-issue subscriptions for several people, with the hope that our finances have improved by then and more money is available to help such people out at that point. John Cowan put together a new parser based on the current set of proposed grammar changes, which are expected to be approved, and it will hopefully be tested thoroughly in coming weeks by some key people who write a lot of Lojban text. Sunday night and Monday were spent in more Lojbanic activities, a little conversation, and going over David Twery's writing effort which he has posted here already. By then everyone was exhausted, as another busy and successful Logfest came to an end. We aren't sure what LogFest will be like next year, given that we expect to have the patter of little feet around by then, and have not yet set a date for LogFest 93. We expect that there will be much more in-language activities, since the current class should be conversationally functional within a few weeks. Given the addition to our family, we are hoping others coming to LogFest will bring their families as well. There is a possibility for a weekend gathering before next LogFest which will be an all-Lojban affair, with no English permitted. This is an ambitious undertaking - the language is ready for it though. The major factor will be the adoption process and the impact of it (and the kids) on our time. The critical factor, as the new Lojban class has found out, is vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. They have covered most of the grammar in seven 2-hour sessions, but noone has nearly enough vocabulary comand to converse. Hopefully with this weekend gathering as a goal, those of the community who want to see the language brought to life will get to work on their word lists and LogFlash, and try to be here if we can put this weekend together. lojbab