Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 08:15 PM 02/18/2000 -0600, Rex F. May wrote:
>"Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" wrote:
> > Yes. As long as it is to be "Loglan", the current system is defining. We
> > felt extremely constrained in building Lojban to be consistent with JCB's
> > ideas for the language and the grammar, and the fact that most of the
> > changes to the classical language in the last 10-12 years have been exactly
> > the same changes that we made for Lojban proves that we indeed were still
> > following his lead.
> >
> > When we started Lojban in 1987, Nora suggested an even easier method of
> > self-segregation - using a unique final vowel for ending words. The idea
> > lasted about 1 minute, and we decided that it was not true to JCB's intent.
>
>Hmm. No offense, but that seems like an odd attitude, somehow. I mean,
>I'd look critically at anything JCB didn't accept, but only because I respect
>his instincts as the founder of the language. On the other hand, I suppose
>that you felt that you specifically did _not_ want to go far afield enough to
>have a fundamentally different language. I understand that, but don't
>really understand why. To me, the play's the thing.

Well, I think it stems partly from the fact that with the exception of 
Nora, the first four of us were NOT "conlang"ers, had never been bitten by 
the language invention bug and did not have much interest in the language 
invention process. We were interested in USING the language, and that 
meant getting something usable with a minimum of work. Tommy Whitlock and 
Gary Burgess both came from the polyglot linguist point of view for whom 
Lojban was another neat language to learn and maybe to analyze 
linguistically. Nora had been a language-inventor who had given it up when 
faced with Loglan which even in 1975 was far better than anything she had 
come up with. She also was focussed on using rather than inventing a 
language. And I was JCB's alienated (temporarily, I hoped) dictionary 
worker and community rebuilder, trying to document what other people had 
done, and totally uninterested in language invention, though I liked 
finding and fixing problems. Since I had no linguistics or language 
building experience at all, and was not all that proficient in Loglan 
myself (though that changed quickly), I had NO basis on which to counter 
JCB's instincts except the consensus of my fellow workers (if 3 Loglanists 
agree on something, it just may be right %^). My expertise was the 
rationalization and documentation of complex systems designs, since that is 
what I did professionally as a military systems contractor, and I tackled 
Loglan/Lojban as a documentation problem for a complex software project 
with faulty configuration management. It worked.

Clearly our focus was totally on getting a product done. As I further 
contacted the then-Loglan community and realized how strong the demand for 
stability was, less and less consideration was made to anything but getting 
a set of language describing books out there for people to learn from.

This quest for final definition and stability dominated until I taught the 
first Lojban class in 1989 using the draft textbook, and these relative 
beginners managed to poke a couple of big holes in the supposedly stable 
and final design. We went through a short spate of bug fixing for about 6 
months and then resumed the quest for stability, but in the meantime, I had 
gotten distracted from the textbook writing process, which has never really 
been resumed.

There were two other short periods of bug fixing, one when John Cowan 
became involved and seriously tackled understanding the YACC grammar - I am 
not a compiler person, and had put the Lojban YACC grammar together rather 
haphazardly. John, among other things rewrote the MEX and tense grammars 
to their current form, and in the process made things more systematic. The 
other major change at that time was the handling of sumti-raising, which 
was motivated as a bug fix but was largely an enhancement and not a change 
(a lot of place structures changed as a result of the problem analysis though).

The other major bug fix came about when Colin Fine discovered a scope 
ambiguity in arguments with relative clauses (no idea whether TLI Loglan 
has dealt with this one yet), that forced a complete redesign of the 
internal grammar of sumti - one that changed almost nothing in actual usage 
but which looked completely different in the YACC grammar.

I may have missed some small bug fixes, but almost all other changes were 
regularization of things already in the language (to simplify and clarify 
teaching) and enhancements to fill out the details of the fringes of the 
language when people found limitations in actual usage.

Hmm, I never though I could manage in 6 paragraphs to summarize the bulk of 
what we did with JCB's language in 10 years.

Other than these times I mentioned, change simply was something to be 
avoided. So for us, the play was not the thing, the completed product 
was. The Loglan community wanted a language to use, and only then would 
stop sitting on the sidelines. I promised them a stable and well-defined 
Loglan, which JCB did not agree was a priority, and even without completing 
our delivery of the description of that stable language, usage has taken off.

With that usage, Lojban (and Loglan overall) has to a considerable extent 
ceased to be something that people can dispassionately decide to 
"change". I don't control it, which is why it is easy for me to promise 
the Lojban community to defend the Lojban baseline as we discuss the future 
of the language. Even if I was motivated to, I don't think I could change 
the baseline anymore - the community would revolt and I would lose, just as 
the community revolted in 1986 and started Lojban.

And that, I hope, explains more fully why even if your morphology ideas 
were the greatest thing since sliced bread, we could never consider them as 
part of "Loglan".

Another BTW. I argued with JCB over that damn 'ao' rhymes with
>'cow,' thing in Loglan, insisting that it should be 'au.' And lo and
>behold, you corrected it in Lojban. Now, the question is (and I do
>mean this seriously, not at all sarcasitically, however it may sound)
>how is it that you see that correction as an OK variation but the
>nCnV not?

That was a first-weekend decision Memorial Day 1987, as we attempted to 
establish algorithmically sound rules. The bottom line is that linguists 
describe that diphthong in terms of "au" (or "aw" using the semivowel), and 
we were trying to find low-error ways of encoding the sound-rules - I had 
to rely on 3 or more people working independently at a high productivity 
rate to do the 6 to 12 language dictionary lookups for 1000+ words needed 
to remake the words by the end of 1987, when a plain 8086 computer was 
still the most common machine. I supported what the polyglot linguists 
were comfortable with, and it had the nice advantage of being an 
identifiable minimal algorithmic difference from the "copyright" language 
(when we were still hazy on copyright law) and yet had no direct effect on 
the Loglan-88 prims (since prims do not have diphthongs).

That many had argued with JCB over the issue, made it one of the few easy 
changes. It was only what was controversial within the 1979-83 Loglan 
community that we felt comfortable even considering for change.

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 (newly updated!)