RE: On international applications of Lojban

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@pmail.net>]

> From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>
>
> At 04:09 PM 12/29/99 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >My response to the Top-Down idea of IAL or Lojban adoption
> >is to wonder why it should be a good thing for the adopting
> >body? Take the European patent organization: it would be
> >a trivial task to develop a language that shares Lojban's
> >virtues of nonambiguity and other areas of suitability to
> >the formulation of patents but is much simpler and easier
> >to learn;
>
> Really?  If it were so easy, why haven't they done so?

Either because they haven't perceived the need or because some
cost/benefit analysis doesn't justify it.

> Personally, I don't think you can get much simpler than
> Lojban and still do the job. The primary extraneous feature
> of Lojban not applicable to patents is the attitudinal/evidential
> system.  Even audible unambiguity has some value.

There is nothing relevant that Lojban can do that standard
predicate logic notation can't. In a Polish/Reverse Polish predicate
logic notation you need nothing but predicates, variables,
one or two quantifiers and two or three connectives. In other
words, setting aside how variables are handled, you could have
a language with only 3 cmavo! I'll admit that that number might
be expanded a bit, e.g. to include numbers, but even an expanded
cmavo inventory would be only a tiny proportion of Lojban's.
Likewise, the entire syntax could be formulated in a single
sentence.

> >  logicians have been using such languages for decades.
>
> 1) What language have logicians used that could be used for writing a
> patent description?  Key here is "description", and description takes
> meaningful content words.  Patents include both things and processes, and
> both have to be describable, hence tanru and description sumti both
> requiring content words and both capable of being disambiguated
> semantically to an arbitrary degree of specificity as well as
> grammatically.

Of course the predicate words' senses have to be defined. But in Lojban the
predicate words' senses are not defined -- this task has been left to
'usage'
to achieve.

> 2. The language of logic that most people have seen is the predicate
> calculus.  Being a reasonably bright sort of guy who struggled to barely
> pass a self-paced college level course in the stuff, I daresay that many
> would call the predicate calculus easy to learn.

Is that irony? If so, I guess that they problem with predicate calculus is
that there's no fudgeability with it, which nonfudgeability is exactly why
one wants a logical language. Note also that predicate logic is a subset
of Lojban, so if you learn Lojban you learn predicate logic plus a load
of extra stuff.

> Computer languages that include logic come closer to the mark, but they
> also lack content words.
>
> >  Likewise for an IAL; if the EU did decide it
> >would be economically advantageous (tho I think it wouldn't),
> >for what reason (other than idiocy) would it opt for the
> >halfarsed candidate IALs currently on the market?
>
> If it were easy to develop a better one, I am sure that people would have
> done so already.

Why? Most of the people who invent IALs are total lunatics, and most of the
rest are either ignorant or dim.

> It isn't merely money that is lacking (though money would
> be nice) - Interlingua had money backing it, and of course DLTs machine
> translation internal interlanguage based on Esperanto had money backing
> it.  A language sufficient to do the job will have to be sufficiently
> complex, and G-d knows that balancing complexity vs. needed
> features is far from easy.
>
> Then there is the key advantage of an existing language in that there are
> people who already know it and who therefore can serve as
> teachers, already written teaching materials that people can learn the
> language from without teachers if necessary.  It took 3 years of teaching
> material development to get Lojban to the point that Nick Nicholas could
> teach himself the language from the materials and be able to write cogent
> Lojban without a lot of coaching, and it took him a few more years of
> work before he felt himself skilled at the language.  Only with the
> advent of the Book have we had significant numbers able to teach
> themselves Lojban, and a goodly number have said that even that is not
> sufficient for them.  Going from raw language concept to the Book is
> dozens of person-years of effort.  Going from there to even the current
> level of Lojban prowess is many more person-years of effort on the part
> of self-teachers.  And we don't yet have enough to teach the European
> patent community (hence by initiation of this thread), much less the rest
> of Europe.  There is a likelihood that Esperanto could come up with the
> needed teachers reasonably quickly, especially given that for many it
> would their first chance to make money using the language (which can be
> a strong motivating force for many who have half-learned Esperanto,
> probably including a goodly portion of this list).

I'm not sure what point you're making. I agree that there are these
obstacles to the adoption of Lojban. And as I've said, I think Lojban
and Esperanto would be poor choices for a patent language, or for a
European IAL.

> >In my view, the Bottom-Up approach is the only viable one
> >for Lojban and currently extant IALs.
>
> But is the bottom-up approach viable at all?  I think that it is a
> necessary step - necessary to build the infrastructure of teachers and
> teaching materials and lexicon, but the key problme of bottom-up is
> achieving any sort of critical mass.

I've never believed Lojban to be viable in the sense that you mean, and
have no burning desire to assist it to become viable.

> Lojban has probably achieved critical mass enough to survive it
> inventors (which makes it one of the most select of conlangs),

I am certain this is so. There's now the Book, which contains pretty
much all there is to know about the language, and I imagine it will
always attract small numbers of people who find Lojban appealing.

> but not necessarily enough to gain a respectable "market
> share" among the languages of the world.  (I think Lojban has the
> advantage that it needs a lot smaller number than other conlangs to
> achieve critical mass, because Lojban unlike most conlangs DOES have
> the sort of specialty application like patent law and
computer-communications
> that is economically viable with only a small fraction of the world
learning
> it.  And economic viability is the key to "top down" - a top down
> approach will work when someone with power sees a way to make money using
> the language.

I very much doubt that this will happen, though it happening is Lojban's
only real hope for achieving critical mass.

But at any rate, I don't see why you should care so much. I recognize that
you've decided that the validation for all the efforts you've invested in
Lojban is the creation of a living language rather than just a language,
but I don't understand why you should make that the validation, especially
when it's so improbable. And the original idea that a loglan-speaking
community would test sapirwhorf, I've always regarded as a bit of blarney
baloney by JC Brown who really wanted to invent a language but was trying to
(a) gain respectability for an ill-respected activity, (b) differentiate
the product from others, (c) attract adherents.

> >  The only hope for
> >Lojban to succeed Top-Downly is that some organization is
> >intelligent enough to see the merits of adopting a logical
> >language, but stupid enough to choose Lojban to do the job.
>
> Gee, thanks. %^)

What I mean is this. First, the overriding goal of the Lojban project was
always to get a minimally adequate product out into the world. The policy
was "if it's not broken, don't fix it". But if you're an organization that
is so dissatisfied with existing natural languages that you want to
adopt a logical language, you're probably an organization that wants the
language to be as good as is practicable. Secondly, and more importantly,
Lojban was designed as a compromise between many different goals. It is
probable that an organization adopting a logical language would have
different and fewer goals, and that Lojban would be a relatively poor
solution for these goals.

I suppose that once one organization used Lojban, that would then become
a reason in itself for other organizations to use it too. But I really
can't see it being a sensible decision for any organization to adopt it
otherwise. True, it already exists, so would save labour in concocting
an alternative language, but if you're going to invest so much in getting
your organization to use it, a redesign would probably save you cost
in the long run.

I'm not hostile to Lojban. If the United Nations decided to choose a
language to be a global general purpose second language, and if I
had a vote, then if the choice had to be made from an existing language
then I would vote for Lojban. And even if there was the option of
designing a new language I would vote for Lojban to avoid the risk
of the designed language being worse than Lojban. On the other hand,
of course, if the United Nations decided to entrust the task of
designing the language to me, then I would not choose Lojban...;-]

> >(This isn't an attack on Lojban. Lojban is more complex
> >than it needs to be for limited, formal, written applications
> >because it needs also to be usable for the full range of
> >linguistic functions.
>
> What linguistic functions other than attitudinals are not needed
> for patent work?

Lojban is designed to be general purpose, flexible, nonconstraining,
culturally neutral, etc. etc. The only two of its goals necessary
for patent work are logicality and nonambiguity.

> More importantly, how much simpler could a language optimally
> designed for a limited purpose be than a Lojban subset that simply omits
> those features not needed.  After all, a large portion of the
> Loglan/Lojban concept is optionality of features.

If you pared Lojban down to the smallest adequate portion you'd still
be left with unnecessary stuff (e.g. zo'u, terminators) and what remained
would be Lojban only in as much as that unnecessary stuff would remain
and that the vocabulary items would be Lojban. And the vocabulary items
being Lojban would be a positively unnecessary hindrance to efficient
use of the language. It would be much easier for all concerned to use
a posteriori European vocabulary.

> >  (I still think it's unnecessarily complex grammatically even
> given that,
> > but that's not my point.))
>
> And of course you yourself have tried to come up with an alternative, and
> apparently found it not all that easy.

My own language is a general purpose one like Lojban, and has to grapplie
with a similarly disparate set of design goals, and the difficulty is
mainly in the amount of work involved. I could design the basis for
a European patent language in scarcely more than the time it would take to
decide on the phonology.

> Jim Carter tried for something simpler and more algorithmic, and likewise
> made several false starts before coming up with something that few even
try
> to learn.

But Jimc was trying to create an implementation of Loglan, not just create
a minimalist logical language. And I don't think the number of people who
try
to learn it tells you anything significant.

> Again, if it were so easy to do much better than Lojban, why hasn't anyone
> even come close?

First, it is not so easy to do better than Lojban if you have the same goals
as Lojban. It is easier to do better than Lojban only if you have a more
restricted set of goals. Second, if it is possible to do better than Lojban,
with the same set of goals, this is largely because it is possible to learn
from Lojban's 'mistakes', i.e. it is by standing on Lojban's shoulders that
Lojban can be bettered. Third, even if it were easy to improve upon Lojban's
design, there remains the matter of the huge amount of labour necessary to
get any language to the level of completion that Lojban has attained.

Also, in a certain sense, it has been proved that it is easy to do better
than Lojban, because over the years people have often proposed valid
improvements that were not adopted (on the grounds that completion was
a more important goal than improvement).

--And.