From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:54:34 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI Received: (qmail 4738 invoked from network); 25 Aug 1997 20:15:25 -0000 Received: from segate.sunet.se (192.36.125.6) by xiron.pc.helsinki.fi with SMTP; 25 Aug 1997 20:15:25 -0000 Received: from segate.sunet.se by SEGATE.SUNET.SE (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.D341E5E8@SEGATE.SUNET.SE>; Mon, 25 Aug 1997 22:15:14 +0100 Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 16:14:46 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Comparison: Loglan / Lojban ? X-To: CONLANG@BROWNVM.BROWN.EDU, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Veijo Vilva Content-Length: 6463 Lines: 112 Message-ID: Nick Summers asked: >A little while ago some very definite preferences >were voiced in relation to these two loglangs, >without any real reasons being given. Would anybody >care to explicitly state their reasons for preferring >one over the other? I suppose I am interested in >opinions related to linguistics or logic rather than >history/politics. The split between what is now LLG and The Loglan Institute was essentially purely political. However, due to Dr. Brown's copyright claims on every word of the language, we chose to go back to the most basic level, do our own linguistics research, and "reinvent the language". Notwithstanding the comments of others, there has really been very little drifting apart in one sense. Almost any text written in current TLI Loglan can be mechanically translated by word substitution into equivalent Lojban. You have to be careful about place structures, but there is little in the TLI language that does not have an exact Lojban equivalent. Lojban on the other hand IS arguably superior both logically and linguistically, for a variety of reasons, some of particular interest to conlang designers, especially those seeking an international audience. Lojban may effectively be described as a superset of TLI Loglan - we have added many features that are linguistically necessary or at least very useful. In some cases, TLI has followed the exact same path, a few years later - which is one reason why "drift" hasn't much happened. Stylistically, there is much greater distance. Almost no one actually writes in TLI Loglan (and there are no known speakers). The written text that is published or which appears on the net is riddled with English-origin metaphors and idiomatic semantics. TLI writings have an appearance of greater "logicness" because the writers tend to use the formal logical style more, but since they do so in a flawed manner, the results is usually more humorous than communicative. Lojban has several people who have maintained conversation in the language, and Nick Nicholas is perceived by others as speaking at fluent speeds, though he feels he is still one notch short of that level. Both speech and writing in the language is "natural" in style, with logical constructs used only when logical precision is useful. On the other hand, the basic predicate nature of the grammar and other features tend to make Lojban usage a tad more precise than most natural language (stylistically, I mean - people TRY to be more precise). Lojban carries through on a couple of Loglan design goals that we believe TLI has failed to maintain, specifically unambiguous resolution of a speech stream into specific words, and formal unambiguity in the grammar. The arguments on each of these features is fairly technical and TLI continues to make improvements with each iteration of announced changes to their language, so I am not absolutely sure how many problems still exist. TLI Loglan phonology was devised using "taste tests" by native English speakers. The phonology therefore abounds in sounds and clusters that are familiar and easy for English speakers, but TLI abandoned an earlier more linguistically regular and neutral phonology. The Lojban design returned to linguistic principles in setting the rules for consonant clusters, and the result is clusters less likely to be misheard. Lojban phonology is also defined in terms of IPA sounds. As an example of TLI Loglan problems of this sort, the current edition of Loglan 1 says that "e" before vowels is pronounced as "eigh" as in "eight", but the supposedly distinct diphthong "ei" is pronounced as [ay] as in "day". What the difference is between these two is most unclear, but the result is that the vowel group "eio" is indistinguishable from "eo". The TLI Loglan tense system is simple and probably inadequate for complex communication needs. With Lojban, we had the benefit of analysis by tense logician John Parks-Clifford (pc) formerly the president and chief linguist/logician for TLI. The Lojban tense system now includes a perfective system that has come to be at leats as commonly used as the simple tenses, as well as a variety of modal modifiers. The TLI complex tense system is effectively unanalyzed, and we believe it still to be grammatically ambiguous, though this cannot be checked since the current formal grammar is a "trade secret". Lojban reanalyzed the problem of emotional attitude expression, using among other things the ideas in Elgin's La'adan, with the resulting language much richer and hence in a sense less "logical" in that it is more capable of finely distinguished emotional expression than probably any natural language. Another area of significant difference is that we worked with an existing semantic problem involving varying levels of abstraction (the phrase "object raising" is used in linguistics, and we use "sumti raising" in the more generalized Lojban case) within the semantics of many predicates. An example of this is the distinction between "The food is done" vs. "The preparation of the food is done". Lojban requires that the former be marked because "the food" is "raised" from the abstraction "the preparation of the food". TLI Loglan has no way to mark this. The result is semantically very muddy. Lojban has a complete system for dealing with numbers and mathematical expression. TLI Loglan has an admittedly incomplete "stub" of a design. These are just a few of the differences. Lojban allows one to be as logically and semantically sloppy as one wants, but has added the mechanisms needed to fix many known problems. And this is in the final analysis the reason teh languages differ: Lojban has seen considerable "live" usage, with the results plowed back into the design before we called the language "done". Lojban now is frozen for at least 5 years, and any later changes will probably be made solely by fluent Lojbanists. TLI maintains its intention to keep fiddling with the language design indefinitely, whcih in turn keeps a lot of people from even trying to learn it. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@access.digex.net Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: ftp.access.digex.net /pub/access/lojbab or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/"