RE: On international applications of Lojban

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@xxxxxx.xxxx]

At 04:09 PM 12/29/99 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>My response to the Top-Down idea of IAL or Lojban adoption
>is to wonder why it should be a good thing for the adopting
>body? Take the European patent organization: it would be
>a trivial task to develop a language that shares Lojban's
>virtues of nonambiguity and other areas of suitability to
>the formulation of patents but is much simpler and easier
>to learn;

Really? If it were so easy, why haven't they done so? Personally, I don't 
think you can get much simpler than Lojban and still do the job. The 
primary extraneous feature of Lojban not applicable to patents is the 
attitudinal/evidential system. Even audible unambiguity has some value.

> logicians have been using such languages for decades.

1) What language have logicians used that could be used for writing a 
patent description? Key here is "description", and description takes 
meaningful content words. Patents include both things and processes, and 
both have to be describable, hence tanru and description sumti both 
requiring content words and both capable of being disambiguated 
semantically to an arbitrary degree of specificity as well as grammatically.

2. The language of logic that most people have seen is the predicate 
calculus. Being a reasonably bright sort of guy who struggled to barely 
pass a self-paced college level course in the stuff, I daresay that many 
would call the predicate calculus easy to learn.

Computer languages that include logic come closer to the mark, but they 
also lack content words.

> Likewise for an IAL; if the EU did decide it
>would be economically advantageous (tho I think it wouldn't),
>for what reason (other than idiocy) would it opt for the
>halfarsed candidate IALs currently on the market?

If it were easy to develop a better one, I am sure that people would have 
done so already. It isn't merely money that is lacking (though money would 
be nice) - Interlingua had money backing it, and of course DLTs machine 
translation internal interlanguage based on Esperanto had money backing 
it. A language sufficient to do the job will have to be sufficiently 
complex, and G-d knows that balancing complexity vs. needed features is far 
from easy.

Then there is the key advantage of an existing language in that there are 
people who already know it and who therefore can serve as teachers, already 
written teaching materials that people can learn the language from without 
teachers if necessary. It took 3 years of teaching material development to 
get Lojban to the point that Nick Nicholas could teach himself the language 
from the materials and be able to write cogent Lojban without a lot of 
coaching, and it took him a few more years of work before he felt himself 
skilled at the language. Only with the advent of the Book have we had 
significant numbers able to teach themselves Lojban, and a goodly number 
have said that even that is not sufficient for them. Going from raw 
language concept to the Book is dozens of person-years of effort. Going 
from there to even the current level of Lojban prowess is many more 
person-years of effort on the part of self-teachers. And we don't yet have 
enough to teach the European patent community (hence by initiation of this 
thread), much less the rest of Europe. There is a likelihood that 
Esperanto could come up with the needed teachers reasonably quickly, 
especially given that for many it would their first chance to make money 
using the language (which can be a strong motivating force for many who 
have half-learned Esperanto, probably including a goodly portion of this list).

>In my view, the Bottom-Up approach is the only viable one
>for Lojban and currently extant IALs.

But is the bottom-up approach viable at all? I think that it is a 
necessary step - necessary to build the infrastructure of teachers and 
teaching materials and lexicon, but the key problme of bottom-up is 
achieving any sort of critical mass. Lojban has probably achieved critical 
mass enough to survive it inventors (which makes it one of the most select 
of conlangs), but not necessarily enough to gain a respectable "market 
share" among the languages of the world. (I think Lojban has the advantage 
that it needs a lot smaller number than other conlangs to achieve critical 
mass, because Lojban unlike most conlangs DOES have the sort of specialty 
application like patent law and computer-communications that is 
economically viable with only a small fraction of the world learning 
it. And economic viability is the key to "top down" - a top down approach 
will work when someone with power sees a way to make money using the language.

> The only hope for
>Lojban to succeed Top-Downly is that some organization is
>intelligent enough to see the merits of adopting a logical
>language, but stupid enough to choose Lojban to do the job.

Gee, thanks. %^)

>(This isn't an attack on Lojban. Lojban is more complex
>than it needs to be for limited, formal, written applications
>because it needs also to be usable for the full range of
>linguistic functions.

What linguistic functions other than attitudinals are not needed for patent 
work? More importantly, how much simpler could a language optimally 
designed for a limited purpose be than a Lojban subset that simply omits 
those features not needed. After all, a large portion of the Loglan/Lojban 
concept is optionality of features.

> (I still think it's unnecessarily complex grammatically even given that, 
> but that's not my point.))

And of course you yourself have tried to come up with an alternative, and 
apparently found it not all that easy. Jim Carter tried for something 
simpler and more algorithmic, and likewise made several false starts before 
coming up with something that few even try to learn.

Again, if it were so easy to do much better than Lojban, why hasn't anyone 
even come close?

lojbab
----
lojbab ***NOTE NEW ADDRESS*** 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:
see Lojban WWW Server: href=" http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/ "
Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.