Re: The Mad Proposals

[Matthew Faupel <matthew@CPDAPO.TELE.NOKIA.FI>]

JL= Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>
     in a message sent on Mon, 7 Mar 1994 22:32:51 EST

I like the general idea of these proposals, especially the fact that it
removes four question words from Lojban (their large number and lack of
morphological relation to each other is one of my minor niggles about the
language).  The (effective) reduction of all logical connectives to use JA
is quite neat too.

I have a number of reservations though:

1.  Any change to the language, even if it is a compatible improvement, has
    to be considered very carefully before being taken on board.  There is
    now a significant amount of published material in Lojban and thus a
    significant amount of effort that has to be expended to update this
    e.g. the textbook and the paper on logical connectives for a start.

2.  The proposed changes involve the redefinition of the meaning of two
    cmavo (ji and gu) which would thus render invalid any existing text with
    these words in.  This is a big change to make (more than a proposal that
    just caused the previous words to become "archaic").

There is also one grammatical problem that I spotted:

JL: MAD PROPOSAL NUMBER 4:

JL: Change {ji} from selmaho A to selamho JA

JL: RATIONALE:

JL: This one is just to round everything off. The question connective becomes
JL: regular.

Doing this means that there is no longer a question word for selma'o A
(which you haven't completely done away with).  This would force people to
use the unelided forms of sumti when asking questions, e.g.:

    do visku le nanmu ku ?ji le ninmu

I think that this also means that the answer ".e" (or any other A) would be
invalid, though since you can answer "joi" (of JOI) to a question "ji" (of
JA) at the moment, perhaps not.

On a slightly different tack:

JL: {guje}'s would be most similar to the current form, but {jegu}'s
JL: would be the logical choice. Then forethought connectives would all
JL: be of the same form, instead of today's variety:

JL: je gi .... gi ....  (instead of    ge ... gi ...)
JL: joigi .... gi ....  (as is now  joigi ... gi ...)

JL: je gu .... gu ....  (instead of  gu'e ... gi ...)
JL: joigu .... gu ....  (no current equivalent)

If the proposals were adopted, I think I'd prefer gije, gijoi, guje, gujoi
etc. to match the existing .ije etc. (which can't be reversed in order).
This would mean having to change the existing joigi to gijoi though.

In summary I like the idea, but to support it I'd have to be convinced that
the vast majority of the Lojban community was in favour and willing
individually to put in effort to facilitate the change.  Otherwise, any
language reform at this stage would inevitably delay work on other important
areas such as producing more written Lojban material.

What I think Lojban really needs is a professionally published textbook and
set of dictionaries to the same standard at least as that of available
Esperanto material.  I am impressed by the quality and detail of what's
already been produced (and *love* the fact its available electronically) but
a book that Joe Public can buy from his bookshop is an important step along
the road for acceptance of a planned language.  A4 loose leaf folders
wielded by starry-eyed believers are ten a penny :-)  As I understand it,
work is underway on these things; I'd hate for it to be held up.

Terveisin,


Matthew