From lojbab@access.digex.net Wed Nov 8 06:31:46 1995 Received: from access1.digex.net (ql/6O0AY1b.Cw@access1.digex.net [205.197.245.192]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id GAA21844 for ; Wed, 8 Nov 1995 06:31:44 -0500 Received: (from lojbab@localhost) by access1.digex.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) id GAA19121 ; for ; Wed, 8 Nov 1995 06:28:39 -0500 Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 06:28:39 -0500 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199511081128.GAA19121@access1.digex.net> To: MarkLVines@EWORLD.COM Subject: Re: Personal Apology Cc: cowan@ccil.org, lojbab@access1.digex.net Status: OR The features you like so much about Lojban all date back to JCB's design (as well as the "flaw" you have been focussing on). Yes I have contributed a great deal to Lojban, but not nearly enough to displace JCB, or even claim that I deserve an equal share of the limelight (I get it anyway). My biggest contribution is, in effect, as the political leader who put together a successful challenge to JCB where others had failed (actually had chosen to fail on principle) before me. My second biggest contribution is as a sytems engineer. For the DoD I could analyze a complex set of systems requirements and see where a weapons system was and was not meeting those requirements, looking simultaneously at the forest and the trees. I did the same with Loglan - saw where JCB was not meeting his own design standards, and found solutions to fix them with minimal change. But I did not create any new standards - merely enforced his own. And all design ideas were already present in the language - I merely altered and extended them. For example, my biggest improvement to the language, i feel, is the expanded attitudinal set. I saw flaws and limitations in what JCB did, and did a quick fix. Then in 1989 someone else saw that what I had done was only a half-assed solution and suggested that we do a whole-assed solution, and I went back to the drawing board. The result I consider to be on a par with the other major ideas of the language, but neither the concept of emoticon words, nor the idea for a complete revamping of the system, was my own idea. If I were interested in developing my own conlang, I would have almost no idea where to start, and whatever I did would be derivative of JCB's because I like so many of his ideas, and have few new ones of my own. I have things that I would do over if it were back in 1987, (or better, if we were starting over today, because remaking the gismu would take a fraction of the time today that it took then due to the increased computer power, and the algorith I would like to use would be far more compute intensive). The problem you are focussed on isn;t one of them, and doesn't even blip me as a problem. (I would improve the rafsi assignments simply by being more discriminatory about how we selected the gismu - by using more of the alphabet, we would have had fewer collisions, and less need for kerfa->kre style rafsi and more of tye mnemonic ones. I was not even interested in linguistics before I met JCB, and it was a friend of mine who dragged me along to see him while visiting me in 1980. I am still not interested in conlangs as a genre, though I have expertise and opinions about what is good and bad about them. If Lojban failed I doubt that I would want to start another. Your apology is certainly accepted. I have not been proud of my argumentation style this time around either. Indeed, as I told Cowan yesterday, you have been bringing out in me all the behviors I most dislike about JCB. Which may in turn mean that you are in some ways too much like me. I don't think that my argumentation style is too often this harsh. I rarely feel that I have to invoke the "that's the way it is, so there!" argument. But Lojban is alive, and Has gotten where it has, and still has momentum because I have generall kept my focus on the final goal, which is a language that is completed and documented and in use, with no fiddlers re-engineering things out from under the language users. Essentially only Esperanto and Interlingua among the living conlangs are in that state, though Klingon may be close largely through Okrand's disinterest. Loglan came VERY close to failing at least twice because of JCB's cpontinued fiddling and refusing to let go. I have no desire more strong than to let go myself, because that is when the language will be "real". Until then I am a steward for all those who have invested in the language so far - either time or money or creativity. And I MUST fuflfill my commitment to them, which is to bring them a stable language. Coupled with all this is the number of times new people have come in loaded with new ideas and suggestions fro improvements, some more radical than yours. In variably, after a year or two, they have come back and said either that a) the understand why I stuck to my guns and agree with my decision on technical grounds, or b) they understand why I had to stick to my guns to keep the language moving forward, because they have seen the next wave of newcomers bring yet additional proposals and come to see the threat of this. Most conlangs have dies because the fiddlers kept changing them and improving them out of existence. Esperanto survived Ido and othe clones,probably only by luck, smart politics on Zamenhof's part, and perhaps World War I which brought and end to the era that spawned the great Euroclone movement. Lately I've been under high stress - not nearly enough Lojban time and twice the commitments that I can fulfill, and too many of the other major players out of action and unable to take up the load. Cowan has gotten back on track, and things are finally jumping forward again after almost 2 years of stagnation; I cannot allow things to falter now with even a minor design change proposal back at the roots of the language, and yours wasn't minor. And now really isn't even a good time to talk about it as a hypothetical, though I seldom want to quash any Lojban List discussion. But we have spent the last year largely dominating the list with an extremely technical logico- semantics issue, reaching no resolution, and only prolonging the agony of pre-publication. The recent light tone on the group, including Jorge's NON- seroious alternate morphology, has been a real moral booster. I NEED THIS right now, and I need more people showing me that the language is working in usage - I believe in my heart that it is ready, but need constant reminders on the list to keep me from being distracted. I also need to have the discussions on the list be such that neither Cowan nor I has to actively particpate more than incidentally, because publishing the reference grammar in the next few months will take more time than we currently have budgeted even without distractions. I guess, I want to apologize to you then, for my harshness in tone. I like someone who is interested enough to follow through an idea in depth, and hate to squelch that type of commitment and energy. And I certainly don't want to drive anyone off from the language or the project. I think you can contribute a lot if you can focus your energies in helpful ways (even if I c can't tell you what ways would be most helpful), and look forward to seeing you continue to explore the lanaguage. Thanks for writing. lojbab