From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Mon Feb 5 05:38:19 1996 Received: from vms.dc.lsoft.com (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id FAA20671 for ; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 05:38:15 -0500 Message-Id: <199602051038.FAA20671@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by vms.dc.lsoft.com (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 067AE768 ; Mon, 5 Feb 1996 5:05:26 -0500 Date: Sun, 4 Feb 1996 14:49:29 -0800 Reply-To: "John E. Clifford" Sender: Lojban list From: "John E. Clifford" Subject: Re: cld X-To: lojban list To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 3805 I try to avoid even reading the political threads unless I am briefly tricked into by titles that suggest they are about, say, quantifiers. I do store them away, however, and in the process of doing that I see bits and pieces. Thus, I found my name mentioned in connection with a proposed (? suggested? urged? hoped-for? dreamed-of?) Committee on Language Development. NO! I do agree that changes ought to be discussed and that the discussion ought to have some influence on what changes are made (even changes only from relative uncertainty to relative certainty on an issue). And I do worry that wrongheaded things will get into standard works and thus make correction harder to achieve later. But I dislike putting the influence of discussion in the form of a committee with a fixed set of members, even if I am one of those members, even if I am principal among those members. Firstly, I -- and anyone else I can imagine being interested in such a group -- will, on any given issue, either be a partisan on one side or the other or think the whole issue is too silly to be worth spending time on (and occasionally both). Thus, the committee will almost never serve as an impartial or even rational judge of issues on their merits, but either devolve into a miniature wrangle that mirrors that in the larger body and come to no decision until wider consensus occurs, or toss off a decision that is hoped to stop the wrangle but involves no particular rationale other than stopping the silliness. Secondly, such committees are a mugs' game at least on a par with theodicy. No position ever settles an issue. No position satisfies the disputants. No position convinces anyone. Every position makes a majority angry at the person who takes the position (often -- at least in theodicies -- lethally so). Questions get solved only by consensus (however achieved -- witchhunts are not to be counted out, I suppose), never by ukase, however well reasoned (etc., blah blah). Thirdly, I have -- can you tell? -- done this before and have never completely healed the wounds from the last time ("JCB" ups my bloodpressure and my heartrate roughly 10% after 12 years). And nothing much was changed -- and much of what was changed by the founding of Lojban as a separate entity has been lost again by consensus. So the wounds are not even from a noble battle finally won but from a minor skirmish in a lost war. But finally, I do not share the perception of the advocates of this committee that Lojban is riddled with defects that will require major work to repair and that its present form is so defective that it ought not be exposed to public inspection. Almost all of the questions I have seemed discussed seem to me to be soluble either at the level of adding or interpreting vocabulary or existing grammar or to involve very minor expansions of the grammar. (I admit that the rather clunky grammar we have taken as definitive sometimes makes objectively minor changes into big deals -- witness the proliferation of logical connectives, for example, through all those names that sound like gross insults to Central European ethnicities -- but a clear sense of what is needed can usually get through even this morass with the intuitive grammar intact.) Most of them, indeed, seem to have involved not actually working through the resources already available and using them to the full (no names, but most of us know who you are -- and even you do eventually, though occasionally without stopping the debate). So, once again, skip the Committee, let Lojbab and Cowan and all get something concrete (but not *in* concrete) out there and see where it goes. And insist it goes where we, the users, want it to. pc>|83