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Re: [lojban] FAQ: Lojban and Loglan (corrected)

At 01:34 PM 05/24/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:

First, what do they have in common, to make the question of
differences relevant?
1.  They share the first thirty years of the history of the Loglan
Project.  The late Dr. James Cooke Brown started the project in 1955
and published the first report of it in the Scientific American in 1960.
After that he led it through two cycles of funding , development and
enthusiast participation before the separation in the late 1980's.
Loglan continued to be developed under that name by Dr. Brown's
group, The Loglan Institute, while a separate group, The Logical
Language Group, centered on Robert LeChevalier and John Cowan,
continued its development under the name Lojban.
While John and I might be called "Lojban Central" today, in the first few years of the split I think that Nora, you, and Athelstan were at least as important. John C. did not even enter the scene until 1991. (Gary Burgess and Tommy Whitlock were cofounders and Jeff Taylor and Jeff Prothero helped on the early grammar work; once you start mentioning names it becomes hard to stop because we were never quite as monolithic as JCB's organization.)
It is also important from a legal standpoint that you add a reference to our right and intent to use the name "Loglan". We do not intend to lose what we won with difficulty. Something like "under the name 'Lojban', while using 'Loglan' as well to stress the project's continuity" or more blatantly "under the name 'Lojban', while reserving the right to use the name 'Loglan' as well". Likewise, at least at first mention, references to the continuation of the original project we have called 'TLI Loglan' so as not to deny to ourselves the right to call our work Loglan.
The separation was over political issues of control of the language; it did not directly affect the design features from the prior development.
This is a close approximation, but given 1. below (remaking the prims) and the later demand that we remake the grammar because of copyright claims, we did reexamine design controversies and made some minor changes. These changes did not affect anything at the broad level of your next 4 points below. 


2.  First among these features,  first order predicate logic formed the
basic grammar of the language.  To make a usable language Dr.
Brown added such logical frills as identity, descriptions of various
sorts, variables over predicates and reduction devices to bring higher
order logic grammatically within the first order.   More practically, he
added devices for carrying on conversations: ways of forming
commands, questions, exclamations, ways of expressing emotions, of
referring to the passing scene and so on.
3.  But through all of this, he intended to keep the feature of first
order logic that it is uniquely decomposable, has only one possible
parsing.  Early on this meant practically little more than  that any
string of sounds or letters that composed a legitimate Loglan
sentence could be broken into words in exactly one way.  In the end,
however, both Loglan and Lojban have grammars which uniquely --
and correctly -- parse every legitimate sentence of the language -- and
computer programs that implement these grammars. This is a feature
of no other language with a reasonable claim to be a full human
language.
4.  At the heart of this system is a division of word classes on strictly
phonological grounds: primitive predicates of form C'VCCV or
CC'VCV, other predicates containing CC in their first five letters,
ending in V and having penultimate stress (and a plethora of other
conditions), names ending in C, and the remaining functional words --
the logical, emotional, conversational, words as well as much of the
necessary grammar  -- spread over V, VV, CV, and CVV.
5.  The primitive predicates in each language derive from words for
the corresponding concepts in the major languages of the world, in
such a way as to maximize the recognizability of the created word by
similarity -- perhaps not obvious ones -- with the home language of
many people.  In addition, each primitive predicate gives rise to one
or more unique fragments which can combine to form new predicates
with meanings derived from the meanings of the constituents.  Each
such compound is, of course, uniquely decomposable into its parts.

But superficially a passage in Loglan and the same content in Lojban
will look very different.  This results from some of the conditions that
created the split originally and from the years of independent
development.
1.  One of the political issues was over who owned Loglan, with the
Institute claiming to have in effect a copyright on every word of the
language.  To meet this problem, the Group recreated all of the
primitive predicates, using the same algorithm but 1980 statistics
(rather than 1950),


Not "1980", though "1980s", mostly 1984, though some words were made later.


 which gave a new list of major languages and new
weights to them.  In addition, the Lojban process took into account
the need for unique compound-building fragments, which had been
added late and ad hoc in Loglan.  The result is that the two sets of
primitives are entirely different (I haven't checked but I doubt there
are more than a couple of real matches and probably as many
homonyms).
Perhaps surprisingly there are 42-odd matches, and a few more homonyms. There are several other words which differ by only 1 or 2 letters, though the differences are not predictable. However,in many cases, we have chosen a different place structure representation for primitive predicates based on different understandings of the semantic needs in speech and in compound-making, because of sumti-raising, and because of differences over absolute vs relative/comparative predication. (i.e. bluer than) 


  The various parts of the little word (V, VV, CV, CVV)
space were also reassigned, so the distribution of items in this area
are quite different. Lojban has been quite enthusiastic in expanding
some of the original categories of little words, so that direct
correlates in Loglan are not always easy to find.
However, in converse, almost all TLI Loglan little words do have a direct correlate. Lojban is thus in a sense a superset of TLI Loglan. 


2. Further, to carry out some of these  tasks, Lojban added  an item
to the phonology of Loglan and changed the representation of one
sound.  Lojban text contains ' and x; Loglan does not have the first
and uses h for the second.
3.  Over the years, both the TLI and LLG have had to deal with a
variety of problems in their grammars.  Each has found solutions for
these problems as they arose, but they have not generally found the
same solutions.  Thus, the two grammars -- while they agree over a
large part of the two languages -- will give different parsing in some
cases, perhaps one even rejecting what the other accepts.
4.  Similarly, over the years each group has had to decide what
certain structures mean and how to say certain things.  Again, the
decisions have been made independently and thus usually differently.
This extends even to the meaning (and place structure) of the
primitive predicates of each language. However, it is probably the
case that all the various meanings that one has accommodated the
other has also, just differently.

The grammar and basic vocabulary of Lojban are baselined and will not change
for some time and then only under the strongest of pressures.
Do you want to put in the much debated baseline statement here? %^) The important thing is not that it will change only under strong pressure, but that we intend it to only change by internal evolution through usage by actual speakers, and not by imposition of changes to the language design prescription. This requires speakers, of course, and the "strong pressure" is only a corollary in that it might take such pressure to get the bulk of speakers to go along with a change that can be "imposed" only by internal usage. 


  Loglan is
officially still changing but has in fact been stable for several years. Although the readily available grammar programs for both languages are not the most up-to-date, 

Our parser is considered as up-to-date as the baseline.
they are enough to use for many detailed comparisons, with the expectation being that significant differences in grammar will appear only in rather remote and 
complex structures.
Again, the fact that Lojban is a superset of TLI Loglan enters in here. There ARE significant differences in such areas as the tense and mekso grammar, and in our wealth of attitudinals. I don't think these are particular complex structures, but it makes the comparison problem only one-way, as going from TLI Loglan to Lojban is rather easy. 


The case of vocabulary comparison is less certain, but
it seems likely that fairly regular, if not automatic, correspondences can be
made between the two languages, probably more easily from Loglan to Lojban
than the reverse.
This seems certain - we should be able to create a predicate to fit arbitrary place structure and approximate meaning and assign it to the corresponding TLI Loglan word. 

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