Re: [lojban] Editorial comment

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/18/2001 11:05:41 PM Central Daylight Time,
nicholas@uci.edu writes:

My concern now is that, as is becoming obvious, the ref grammar is still
much too underspecified, so I would contend there is in fact a place for
lessons ranging *beyond* what is covered in there. A language in which
"John and I at least know what it's used for" can be said of *any* of
its constructions (let alone {fa'a}) is still, I'm afraid, not ready for
prime time. The kicker here is, most of these things *can* be cleaned up
and made ready for prime time, without redesign or tinkering, but simply
by someone strapping down the 'oracles' and documenting what has been
used or said on the mailing list (or in camera --- or in the oracles' own
minds.) (Whether this happens in lessons-format
or dictionary-format or reference-grammar-format is not really relevant,
as long as it's done.) I can't say
I'm confident that this will happen soon, though, and I won't be the one
to do it anyway.

While I share Nick's concern that unclarities and even full gaps be taken
care of, I am less sure that they are as many or as bad as he thinks, but am
more sure than he that the way to fix them does not necessarily lie through
Lojban Central, if the aim is to preserve something that can be called a
logical language.  LC comes in, I am sure, in preserving the freedom from
syntactic ambiguity, since it contains the master grammar tweaker.  But on
the record of the last dozen years or so, the logical side of thing gets
short shrift when compared to any number of other considerations, not
excluding whether LC can figure what is going on after a dozen explanation
attempts.
While I am not sure that the larger community would be more receptive (the
evidence is not favorable, after all), there is more of a chance for logical
maneuvers at least to be heard and tried if presented at large than if kept
in LC.  
Now, in fact, most of the issues on hand at the moment are logical only in a
very attentuated sense (do all the tenses fit within a single pattern or are
there several different ones and, if the latter, what are they -- to which
the first answer is pretty clearly that they do not all belong to a single
pattern, but that is because they are not all tenses in the sense originally
intended -- another case where logic lost out to something [God knows what]
else). So the chances of destroying Lojban's vestigial claims to be a logical
language (even the connection with the language of formal logic is pretty
well gone) are slim.  But still, I think trusting any decisions about the
language to LC (which is, quite wisely, refusing to take it -- while making
it hard for anyone else to) is not a course likely to lead to a happy result.