[lojban] Re: "la" rule

[Bob LeChevalier <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
> > The la rule isn't required with standard (spaces included) 
> > orthography, and without a speaking community.  When we have a skilled 
> > speaking community, we can find out whether la in names in the spoken 
> > language causes problems for humans - after all, humans can parse 
> > English and other human languages successfully, and they aren't 
> > audiovisually isomorphic.
>
> Then why are we bothering in the first place?  I thought there was a 
> reason we wanted audiovisual isomorphism for Lojban.

Because it was a fundamental design requirement for Loglan.  Such 
fundamentals were simply not open for questioning when I redesigned the 
language.

And later because audio-visual isomorphism was supposed to make the 
language easier for machine speech recognition.  But not because it was 
a necessary principle for a human-understandable language, because 
obviously it isn't.

> If that isn't a
> requirement, then we can drop a lot of other confusing stuff from the 
> grammar too.
>
> Or just stick with English.  People can parse that too.

Correct.

> It's like I said, pick your disaster.  Is audio-visual isomorphism an 
> important part of Lojban?  Important enough to keep around?  Is losing 
> it worth keeping pauseless LA?  Apparently it is, to you.  If that's the 
> general feeling, fine.  But do recognize what it is you're doing.

What we are all doing is trying to guess what sorts of errors people 
will learn *not* to make more easily, when in fact human listeners don't 
typically notice the errors when speakers make them.  This is true of 
mandatory pauses as well as "la".  We can't quantify which is the more 
common error, because the mandatory pause doesn't affect the written 
language, and fluent Lojban speakers/listeners who are capable of 
catching pause errors while trying to understand the content probably 
don't yet exist.  But the pause solution would affect ALL Lojban 
sentences with names in them, whereas a "la" or "doi" error only affects 
certain names.

Meanwhile, it is a change to the baselined language, and I am not 
especially interested in considering changes to the baseline except as 
needed to get the byfy work done.

A change here would seem not to invalidate any prior Lojban - it might 
change how people lojbanize their names, but it doesn't make any 
particular text wrong.  It thus is something that can be changed by 
Lojban speakers in the post-baseline world with no impact.  No decision 
is needed now.  And at that point, I might not be so strongly opposed to 
a change.

lojbab



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