older usage of Loglan - reply to Dylan

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

Dylan asks:
> > The specific historical reason is the "SE SORME" = ze mensi issue that I
> > described the other day.  JCB thought it loose and illogical to allow
> > the construction at all,
>
>I agree, but since
>
> > ...it kept creeping back into actual usage
> > (i.e. the little Loglanders in his head always used it %^),
>
>I'll bow to the forces of usage.  (Was he the only one using the
>language at the time?)

pc can probably give a better answer to this since he saw most usage.

JCB attempted to teach his daughter when she was still young enough that
she might have been called a native speaker, with middling success.  As far
as I know, it was used intermittently around their household, just as it is
around our household these days.

There were several mutually unintelligible incarnations of Loglan over
time - one reason we fought and won on the question of using the name -
no one could say what the official language was.  So the reply to your
question should be

>(Was he the only one using the
>>language at the time?)
go'i ca ma

At some times it was only him and his ex-wife (early 60s).  Later there
was a group called the Loglan Sogrun (la lojbau jikcygri)) that
attempted to use the language.  After the 1974-5 books, there was a
flurry of attempted usage, which died down.  Shortly thereafter, JCB
took a few people who visited his house and made them "apprentices in
the language" who supposed acquired some greater command and
understanding of the language than the average person.  But pc, one of
those "apprentices", says that the actual level of skill reached in
those sessions was pretty minimal.

There was a fair amount of written usage in the late 70s, but it was of
decidedly variable quality.  There was nothing like the net to give
people feedback on their learning/writing, so there were 100 users each
with their own mostly-mutually-unintelligible dialects.  Time taken from
submission of a text to publication in The Loglanist was typically 1-2
years (in other words what we have now with me unable to get an issue of
Ju'i Lobypli put out - except that you guys are keeping the language
going on the net far more robustly than any printed publication could
ever be.)

And then in the early 80s, JCB changed the morphology to the affix/lujvo
system that we have now.  But everyone still had the old dictionaries,
and a lot of people had lost contact with JCB who had moved from Europe
to Palm Springs to San Diego, to Gainesville FL (he is back in San Diego
now).  So even as late as when we started Lojban in 1987-8, there were
people still writing in the 1974-5 book dialect.

During that long development time, JCB never claimed the ability to
speak the langguage fluently, though he probably knew the language
better than anyone else.  What he claimed, whenever there was discussion
of an aesthetic rather than a logical point of design, was that in
intensely working on the language, it was as if he could hear the little
denizens of Loglandia talking in his head, and that while he couldn't
talk with them, hearing them gave him a feel for hhow the language
"should sound".

Not unsurprisingly, when I was working extremely intensely on the
language, I started to hear little Lojbanistani's myself %^).  And a lot
of my "authority" I think is based not just on my work on the language
but that somehow, the implied fixed reference of hearing the little
people talk, gave my vision of the language a consistency that held
together pretty well.

Whether you call it "little people talking", or just having a strong
feel for the aesthetics of the language, that almost certainly played a
much stronger role in JCB's decisions about the language design than
actual usage in communication with others, much less logical analysis
(which JCB has made his share of major errors in).

Another way of discussing this is that JCB always talked about the
"human grammar" as a construct that was distinct from the "machine
grammar".  The parser parsed the latter, but people spoke the former -
he wanted a clear mapping of the former to the latter.  SE SORME was a
"human grammar" construct.

When we did the redesign we were uncompromising on this - for us the
machine grammar IS the human grammar.  There may be some machine grammar
constructs that have no human grammar meaning, but there is nothing in
the human grammar that violates the machine grammar (at least in
theory).

When JCB found that he could get SE SORME (ze mensi) to parse in his
machine grammar, he just decreed that it was part of the language.  He
never really even talked about what its logical equivalent was - it just
was part of the language.  It was pc and I that determined that "ze
mensi" meant "ze lo mensi" (partly because JCB used the term
"indefinites" for them, and there is nothing indefinite about 'le') -
and even then we had doubts as to whether it might sometimes mean "ze le
mensi".  If usage leads to the semantics being ambiguous between the two
choices (le vs. lo), I will not necessarily complain.

lojbab