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Re: [jboske] RE: Lojbab on tu'o (was: RE: RE: Nick on propositionalism &c

At 06:42 PM 1/11/03 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
I am attempting to maintain my temper.

Me too. It is far easier with you than with And.

I suggest that you get byfy going so that we have EVERYONE involved. I refuse to concede anything to the jboskeists until all the people who hate jboske are present and also agreeing to concede to jboske. If that makes me appear obnoxious, it has a solution. So long as it appears that things are being decided in jboske that would change the language, I will oppose vociferously, because I am tired of decisions made by And and Jorge becoming defacto interpretations of CLL when in fact they aren't as obvious as people seem to think they are in retrospect.

I am resentful about having to read jboske, but the fact (and the way) that you are participating convinces me that jboske decisions are too likely to become byfy decisions, which means I have to pay attention and fight against anything that I think those not reading jboske will want to not have had predecided.

The only semantics which is baselined is the CLL's.

I disagree. You imply below that the cmavo list might have additional semantics, and the cmavo list is baselined, so how could that possibly mean that the only baselined semantics is in the CLL?

The definitions in the gismu and cmavo list are obviously baselined, to the exact wording, because I received holy hell for deigning to annotate changes on a personal copy. Normally definitions are part of semantics. Now in the event of conflict between CLL and the cmavo list, I agreed and the baseline policy has stated, that CLL takes precedence. But CLL is not complete, and I don't accept that CLL silence when the cmavo list has added stuff not in CLL means that there is a conflict. It may mean that we have a case for word split when the cmavo list definition is considered too broad, given what CLL says. I proposed a word split on tu'o almost as quickly as I disagreed with And on the meaning of tu'o.

If the ma'oste prescribes additional semantics, we can choose to allow
it or not on the basis of (a) usage, (b) logic, (c) the design
principles of Lojban. Among which I count disambiguability.

Semantic disambiguability is not a design principle except when the ambiguity crosses the line into polysemy.

If the ma'oste contradicts additional semantics,

???

we can choose to allow
it or not on the basis of (a) usage, (b) logic, (c) the design
principles of Lojban. Among which I count disambiguability.

The ma'oste, as a baseline document, takes precedence over jboske-ism and usage. I would buy "the design principles of Lojban" except that I am tired of having "founder intent" (whether it be JCB's or mine) being ridiculed, which seems to be the norm on jboske, and there are no "design principles of Lojban" that are not "founder intent", unless they are stated in CLL.

De jure, Bob is right and And is wrong: a vague zi'o is a legal
possible result of any deliberation.

In every other way, Bob is wrong to the point of forcing schism.

I am not forcing schism, but And is forcing me to accept his schism, which I will have to hope will be a schism of one.

I am tired of And threatening schism. You seem to have talked And into helping define "SL" before he schisms, but he still seems to have made it clear that he plans to schism. If he is going to schism no matter what we do, and if he is going to threaten to do so every time I don't concede to him, let him suffer jimc's problem and have a schismatic language that few people care about except as a curiosity.

I hit my breaking point when And suggested that all ellipsis be explicitly marked and that zi'o be the default interpretation for omission instead of zo'e. The nicest reaction I can have to that is to laugh with great ridicule. We aren't talking about natural language use any more, or even usable non-natural language. And we certainly aren't talking about anything having to do with Lojban.

> We have differing ideas as to what is coherent. No one had any question
> about the coherence of the definition until you and Jorge tried to use it
> for something else. I have little sympathy when you set out to break
> things and actually succeed.

This amounts to demanding that noone look at the semantics of CLL too
closely, and noone consider the compositional semantics of anything.

If CLL semantics is baselined, as you say above, then the only justification for changing it is if it is broken. If looking closely means making sure that there are no broken points, I have no problem.

I don't know what "compositional semantics" means in this context and the "of anything" hardly disambiguates, so I cannot comment.

This is unacceptable.

I have yet to see any position you've taken in these discussions to be inherently unreasonable, so for now I'll take your word for it.

>> or (B) what you say is wrong, because
>> these issues have all been discussed
> Frankly I don't give a shit what has been discussed on jboske by 3% of the
> Lojban community, while the rest were doing their best to tune out

The jboskeists have much blame for this; but the fact is, these *are*
difficult issues, and it is easy to get lost in them, and therefore
tune it.

Well, if byfy is going to survive jboske debates, we'll need lots of your clear summaries to make the verbiage intelligible to the rest of us who don't have advanced degrees in lambda calculus. You seem to make stuff clear (up to the recent ontology stuff which I accept is a working document wherein you are thinking through stuff as you go).

If you think the language can go on without working out a more explicit
semantics,

I think it can, but I accept that I am not going to win this one. "More explicit" may or may not mean more rigorous, though I admire your efforts at trying to find a rigorous underpinning.

and those who tune out of jboske are right to do so,

I believe so. jboske is not the kind of forum that can work out what needs to be worked out, because it has no groundrules to keep us from considering out-of-scope proposals (which almost everything And proposes is)

and jboske is not to be considered in any dictionary compilation,

It is not the byfy, and is not mentioned as having any weight in the baseline determining policy.

then you know what? You already have a dictionary. Why not just publish the
ma'oste, like I said, and be done?

Because it does not meet the agreed upon baseline policy, which SAYS what is supposed to be done to make the ma'oste good enough.

If the intent is merely to remove any internal contradictions, and not
make the semantics any more explicit, you will get your wish. You want
loi to mean all of substance, kind, collective, and all products
thereof, with no grammatical means of differentiation? Fine, you'll get
it. But I don't find that a Lojban particularly worth defending.

That has to be the default, with a fairly strong prejudice against changing it. But everyone you would call a "fundamentalist" in this discussion has shown some willingness to be flexible in the face of a good argument. "I don't like being longwinded" is not a good argument. Making no less than four "excellent proposals" when most of the limited number of people following jboske at all aren't even reading them, is not an argument at all.

Oh, and take your fingers-in-ears, "lah lah lah I'm not listening"
chracterisations of jboske discussion as 'garbage', and... uh, stow
them.

Sorry, but I AM tired of listening. I figured that by now we would be doing byfy work, given what you had said, and I see jboske discussions essentially unchanged except that your occasional voice of reason appears. You would also seem tired of listening, given your own complaints about volume. So why are you and I discussing things on jboske, rather than getting byfy moving, LLG accounting straightened out, etc.? I think it is because jboske having no limits expands to fill all time available.

> I have disdain for the assumption that CLL is the only prescription, and
> consider your argument two-faced because you are perfectly willing to throw
> out the CLL prescription when your argument requires it. Thus your
> claiming scriptural qualities to the document rings hollow to me.

CLL is the only baselined prescription.

That is not the policy that you helped vote in. The wordlists are baselined as well. CLL is the determinant in case of conflict.

The ma'oste may have prescribed
extra stuff, but I am not bound to retain the extra stuff if I think it
violates the design principles of Lojban.

I disagree. Reread the baseline policy on the guidelines for decision. (If this accurately describes your intent, I hope it is in your wiki-description of byfy. I'm buying what you wrote for ground rules as a default until byfy is constituted. At that point if I see conflict between your procedures and the guidelines, I'll see what the sense of the byfy membership is and ask you to get the Board to modify the policy if necessary, or modify your procedures if that is the resolution.)

Ambiguity does. Vagueness doesn't,

We don't seem to have good definitions of these terms sufficient for me to tell what is offensive to you and what isn't.

and a tu'o vague between zo'e and zi'o would perhaps pass
muster. But a tu'o that means zi'o in operand contexts, and zo'e in
non-operand contexts? (Because tu'o cannot mean zo'e in operand
contexts: the factorial of n with respect to zi'o is defined, the
factorial of n with respect to 2 is crap.) I will Occam the
combinational semantics of Lojban: a cmavo that means appreciably
different things in different contexts is unlearnable. And if there are
two proposals, of which one makes a cmavo mean X in context A and Y in
context B, and the other makes it mean X throughout, you know which one
I'm going to vote for.

I won't answer this, in part because I am not sure I understand it (zo'e does not necessarily mean "2", and indeed it may not mean any value that the speaker could specify even if he knew what it was). I'll wait to see a formal byfy proposal, which could be either of the two if properly supported. Until then the argument is "garbage".

> But no one wants to use what you are jboskeing. You are creating a work of
> art, perhaps an incarnation of your Livagian logical artlang. That isn't
> Lojban, which is a language that people will use.

Is it a design principle of Lojban that it be a logical language or
isn't it?

We don't seem to agree what that means, and "founders intent" doesn't count any more.

> I already know that one person is somewhat resentful that
> byfy issues are being debated on jboske while the others await a forum that
> is worth participating in. jboske isn't, for them.

You know, I don't particularly want to get BPFK started any more. I too
have despaired of it coming up with anything. Oh, we can tidy up the
inconsistencies, but if we retain the current gadri system completely
as it stands, with no addition and no clarification (which is
consistent with "just tidying up"), then I will quit Lojban right after.

I think there is universal agreement that there be clarification where needed, and limited license for addition, which is better than change. So your conditions for quitting will not be met as stated. We may not satisfy you (or indeed anyone), but we will have something significantly better than we have. Hopefully we will have a document more definitive than CLL on what it attempts to cover.

But why don't we get the bloody thing started and see what can be done? ANYTHING is better than jboske, which cannot and does not resolve anything.

Furthermore, the contention that jboske isn't the forum is
self-deception. What, you think we won't see the selfsame debates with
the selfsame people, times four, on a BPFK forum?

If we do, then it is your job to shut them up, and get them doing something constructive. 90% of the discussion on jboske is out of line with the Board policy, and probably out of line with your own guidelines.

I suspect that if you are doing it right, as I understand your intent, there won't be any discussion of a proposal on the byfy until the proposer has written it up as a documented and supported proposal. There should have been no discussion of tu'o until someone had done the research I did, at least if I understand your intent. But most people on jboske had made up their minds before I did the research, so Cowan had to backpedal, and xod ended up agreeing with me more than I thought he would.

I started to write my own idea of a proper proposal for a minor change last week, but I'm no longer convinced that the change is ideal, otherwise we'd have a badly needed example of what I am hoping that you will expect. Maybe I should post it as an example rather than arguing with And, even if the proposal isn't any good.

But that's just me. I will convene BPFK this week, and ask the list for
volunteers to produce voting software, and for a heads-up on the
concordancing software.

Thank you.

But even if we don't have the software tools in place, instituting procedures, and testing out those procedures on the easier issues before we tackle the tough ones, will get a big chunk of cmavo definitions done, and give people including you some confidence that the thing can work. Starting with the toughest issues is sure to break any attempts at comity.

lojbab

--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org