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Re: [lojban] Re: bridling hostility (was: RE: Re: the ethics of theHTML content meta tag

Invent Yourself wrote:

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Steven Belknap wrote:


I prefer <lojbo> to <logji> here, although the latter would be closer
to being an exact translation of the English.

la lojban po'e lo lojbo bangu (Loglan: A logical language)

Lojban: The Lojbanic Language. Wonderful, let's show the world our
logic by offering a circular definition.

.u'isai

I really do think that this whole discussion is getting extremely silly. OK, legally Lojban is Loglan, and that was very important in creating the whole lobypli and getting us to where we are now. Several people put in a lot of time (and presumably legal costs) into establishing this, and they deserve credit for it. At that point in Lojban history, it was a crucial move, for a number of reasons that aren't worth going into here as they have been discussed repeatedly. However, we are now in the year 2002, in a position where we have Lojban, a constructed language with a small number of speakers and interested parties, and Loglan, a closely related constructed language with a smaller number of interested parties and virtually no speakers (unless things have changed radically in the last few years). Loglanists are aware of Lojban and will get involved in it if they want to; the rest of the world doesn't know and doesn't care.

So, my two pennorth. Lojban is lojban is lojban. This means that if we translate {la lojban.} into English, it should come out as "Lojban" and not "Loglan" or "Volapük". However, we are justified in describing Lojban as a variety, realisation or development of Loglan, and if that arouses the curiosity of Loglanists, that's fine, but it will mean nothing to the rest of the world who don't know what either Loglan or Lojban are. One article in "Scientific American" and a reference in a Heinlein novel counts for nothing in the eyes of the world.

As for HTML headers, two points. Firstly, it is permissable, in terms of netiquette, to include closely-related subjects in your keywords. The rule of thumb should be "If someone were searching for X, would she/he find this page useful or interesting?" Someone searching for "Loglan" would probably find Lojban of interest, so it's OK to have "Loglan" as a keyword (to give a counter-example, putting "renaissance" as a key-word in a gay porn site on the offchance that someone interested in the Renaissance might also like Michelangelo's "David" and therefore like pictures of other hunky guys, is stretching the point way too far).

The second point is whether modern search engines really take that much interest in what you put in your header. In the old days, when the WWW was relatively small and most of the people on it were reasonably honest (ah, nostalgia!) keywords could be relied on as a pretty good indication of what a page was about. Nowadays, AFAIK, people working for search engines are wise to the fact that webmasters include misleading keywords, so they don't take them seriously.

co'o mi'e solri.

(I've changed my moniker from robin.tr - which I adopted to avoid confusion with Robin Powell - to solri, since that is what most of my netfriends know me as, just so I have fewer aliases to cope with)