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Re: [lojban] Re: Loglan


On Dimanche, déce 1, 2002, at 20:47 US/Eastern, Robert LeChevalier wrote:

At 11:28 PM 12/1/02 +0000, And wrote:

Lojbab:
From what I have gathered based on McIvor's comments to me, JCB would
oppose any sort of baseline. JCB would have agreed with And that the
language should just keep changing as people come up with new ideas. It
was the community that wanted a version of the language that (would be
official and) would stop changing. Hence the baseline policy that I came
up with in response to the couple dozen Loglanists who wrote to me write
after I started trying to get the Loglan community back together (which
led

to Lojban)
In the light of recent terminological clarifications, I gather that JCB
and I would favour a baseline, but oppose a baseline freeze. The Naturalists,
on the other hand, might oppose a baseline tout court, or at least see it
as an irrelevance.
No. JCB was a perpetual prescriptivist with an evolving AND informal
prescription. His Academy had no limits on what it could change, when it
could change it, or on the scope of the changes (in theory, his Academy
could have adopted the Lojban design in toto as a language change), but he
personally had a veto on any Academy change.
So did all members of the Academy. We usually managed to argue to a concensus,
but I used my veto power successfully on two of JCB's changes that I thought were inconsistent with Loglan principles. I would say that the Academy followed And's opinion. Maintain the status quo, but be open to extensions and corrections as needed.
The commonest changes were assignment of unassigned rafsi, and place structure modification, though I resisted changes to places to well-known words. Any author could add lujvo as needed.

A baseline procedure means
that the changes are controlled and documented, and that the documents are
maintained to reflect the baseline so that all users have a single
reference point from which to base their usage at a given time. Because of
"trade secrecy" and earlier general sloppiness, there was never a single
language definition in play throughout the community, and indeed arguably
never a single language definition at all. (At the time I started working
with JCB on updating the Loglan dictionary in 1986, I found no less than 4
mutually contradictory "standard" gismu lists in use BY JCB - contradictory
as to what words were on it, sometimes how they were spelled, how many
places they had etc. The first issue of JL reports on my attempts to
resolve this - JCB rejected any such effort.)
At the time Lojbab refers to, the vocabulary was in a mess, which was prior
to the GMR (Great Morphological Revision) with introduction of rafsi and rules for
constructing lujvo which were adopted by Logban when separation took place.
The name of your 'slinkui' rule is based on a Loglan word 'paslinkui' which could
break to pa slinkui if slinkui were a legitimate word. Actually, later we abandoned the
slinkui restriction by requiring paslinkui type words to be hyphenated as pasylinkui.

People would submit Loglan
writings to pc for inclusion in The Loglanist, written in dialects anywhere
up to 3 years old, and they would be printed, sometimes with comment
indicating something new, which is how many of the changes were
promulgated. Other changes were proposed, discussed seriously in the
publications, but never adopted (and no reason given) so that you could not
assume that seeing it in TL meant that it was part of the language (or that
it was NOT part of the language).

I understand that things got better, I suspect in part because of our
example. But I'm not sure whether, before JCB's death, anyone but McIvor
and perhaps JCB had a current definition of the current language and KNEW
it was current including all decisions of the Academy (and it was never
"complete" by my non-semantic standard, much less yours which demand some
semantics clarification). In any event L1, and L3, the two major language
documents on their website, do not agree with each other and the current
language. A baseline change, post CLL publication (our equivalent to L1)
would require change pages for CLL.
Academy decisions were published in Lognet, and if the grammar was affected,
which became ever rarer, incorporated therein. I consider anything which parses with the current grammar (which has no YACC ambiguity) as syntactically correct Loglan, though JCB would consider a lot of such sentences bad usage.

So no, I don't think that JCB even understood a baseline, much less favored
one.
	He probably understood one, but certainly did not favour one.