Re: [lojban] Re: Final nails in the coffin

[Bob Slaughter <rslau@mindspring.com>]

> John E Clifford wrote:
> >...
> 
> Psst.  The curtain's down.  The show's over.

More for you than him. You see, John Clifford has been dealing with Loglan and 
Lojban longer *than you've likely been alive*. And he's provided valuable input
over the years, contributing to the logical soundness of the language. Yep, 
sometimes he's a pain in the arse old-fart, but he's earned that right from 
many of us.

For reference, see 
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=John+Clifford&bl

Excerpts: 

"John Clifford, aka John Parks-Clifford, aka pc, aka la pycyn., is the former 
Vice-President of the LLG, used to be the chief logician of TLI, and is our 
professional expert on logic. He occasionally writes record's to the list 
giving the final decision on hitherto unsettled points."

"Taught at University of Missouri - St. Louis, 1967 - 2000: Logic (from 
Informal through Goedel Theory and Non-Standard)"

"MA in Linguistics (field work on an Indian reservation in India), PhD in 
Philosophy (tense in language and logic -- scrapped Indian logic when the 
Sanscritist who knew some logic left) both at UCLA. Machine Translation 
project at RAND Corp, 1960-2 (and yes, I wrote Fortan 1 programs then)"

"TLI: Editor of The Loglanist (la loglentan) 1976-84, Board Member 1980-4, VP 
1980-2, President (but JCB was Chairman of the Board) 1982-4"
[ Note that the above is for Loglan, the sort-of predecessor of Lojban. ]

> Speaking for myself, I do *not* look forward to the next installment...
> I hope it is a long time and a long way from here... that I could be so
> lucky!

Nor do I look forward to your next installment. You may not have meant to, but 
I feel you come across as yet another newbie with the "I just discovered Lojban
and I think it's really neat except for this ONE thing, and if you accept my 
change, then Lojban will be the GREATEST, and if not, then you all are a bunch 
of old lame losers" attitude.

If your idea is sound (and it may well be; I suspect most people on this list 
are just ignoring your long-winded rants), you should be able to explain its 
merits in a few succinct paragraphs, except for perhaps answering a few 
questions here and there, which is inevitable. Then it would stand or fall on 
its merits, not on how loud its cheerleaders are.

And you missed one of Dr. Clifford's main points in your last wild snippage:
	"As i have said, I don't have an opposing point of view (that featural 
	alphabets are a bad idea); my only interest is to either get you to 
	give a GOOD argument for you proposal or drop it. I have little hope 
	for either happening based on past performance."

So what's the short-and-sweet version? What value would there be for the 
existing community, many of whom have spent years writing various bits of 
lojban in good old ASCII, to dump all the old corpus and tools, and start 
using your proposed alphabet? Would there be any advantage to new learners if 
we did so?


-- 
Bob Slaughter, rslauGUESS@WHATmindspring.com http://www.mindspring.com/~rslau/
North Georgia Modurail: http://www.trainweb.org/northgamodurail/
In which language of the world does the word 'taxi' mean "I cannot drive"?
e'osai ko sarji la lojban fo lonu pilno -- http://www.lojban.org/