[lojban] Baseline statement

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

People, please get a grip. (This includes me, I know. But still.)

People are allowed to express dissent. People are allowed to call for 
the statement to be voted down. This doesn't mean they are evil or 
obstructionist. It is possible to object out of concern for the 
direction the language is taking; it is also possible to be in the 
minority in this opinion. It especially saddens me to see that this 
whole blow-up started so innocuously last week.

(.i ta'o mi na birti ledu'u su'o da pu ritli rinsa la ctefan. ca'o lenu 
cmima le jboste cecmu .i fi'i ctefan. .i .a'o do na xanku ki'u lepu'u 
darlu .i ri se ckaji le cecmu)

Also, calling for broader input on the statement than a vote is legit; 
if a non-trivial number of Lojbanists feel we should try and convoke a 
special meeting on this, then that's certainly an option worth 
considering. Likewise, if the board needs to make statements of 
clarification or expansion, let it. Yes, the board is trusted with day 
to day running, but if the board was collectively possessed by aliens, 
and said tomorrow Lojbanists must all switch to Solresol immediately, I 
think some here would want the opportunity to get a broader vote on the 
proposal before July...

So. On the specifics that have been brought up since the publication of 
the statement, that I haven't already spoken about -- and some that I 
have. I will differentiate my board member persona from my opinion on 
BPFK matters --- on which I can claim authority, but regard that 
authority as suspended until the vote is passed.

1. On Pierre's requests. I've already said my opinion; we can look at 
anything, with some reluctance. That said, I have no reason to believe 
the sky will fall in if we include a page *clarifying* morphology 
issues (as opposed to altering the CLL statement outright), either as a 
CLL addendum or in an appendix to the dictionary. As Bob said, that's 
not in the BPFK's brief, but I think it can take it up. We might need 
board approval, though.

That said, Pierre has convinced me there's an issue. And Lionel, 3-4 
months is not at all an inordinate delay, and I don't think we'll be 
deluged with requests on this. Feel free to put your name down for this.

2.

    Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 13:01:17 -0500
    From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
Subject: Re: Re: [llg-members] Official Statement- LLG Board approves 
new baseline policy

> At 08:20 AM 11/29/02 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
>> I don't use the TLI alternate orthography, so when I write {srutio}, 
>> I don't
>> mean {sruti'o}.
>
> But if srutio is a valid word, then it has to be usable by those who 
> DO you
> the alternate orthography.

Not an argument. That's the alternate orthography's problem; /srutiho/ 
is certainly a distinct string phonologically than /srutio/ as far as 
Lojban is concerned, and it's specious to say otherwise. (And after the 
recent kerfuffle, you should know well that arguments for Loglan 
compatibility can backfire. :-) Pierre's responded to this well anyway.

What on earth is the status of the alternate orthography, anyway, that 
it should constrain Lojban phonotactics? --- I always thought it was as 
unofficial as the Tengwar and Estrangela orthographies. And it is 
mentioned in the same breath as Tengwar in CLL --- and under the 
heading "oddball orthographies". Exigencies of the Loglan orthography 
constrain Lojban no more than exigencies of the Cyrillic orthography: 
fix the orthography, not the language.

Give me a statement in the present baseline that explicitly says the 
Loglan orthography is more important than the Cyrillic in deciding what 
are allowed word shapes. Your aesthetic judgement on srutio is no more 
binding on this issue than And's aesthetic distaste of apostrophes. 
(And provide a language-internal argument, please; if the issue truly 
is rapproachment, I dunno, Loglanise srutio as sruti&ograve; or 
something. It's not like there's that many such strings to begin with.)

And I find it incredible that anyone with any sense of Lojban will hear 
IPA [srutjo] and think that's a lujvo. [tj]? That ain't Lojban. You 
don't get a more clear signal of fu'ivla-hood. (Or are you going to go 
back to the primacy of writing --- and you an unabashed evolutionist!)

3. And.

Reiterating:

A1. The phonotactics of experimental cmavo will be determined by the 
BPFK; it will not be decided beforehand. Both Bob and I envision 
expanding and contracting experimental cmavo space as being within the 
ambit of the BPFK; it does involve a techfix to CLL, but if it becomes 
demonstrably necessary, then we'd be churlish to refuse. I just don't 
feel qualified to make such a determination right now, before 
everyone's gone through what will be seriously proposed and considered, 
and we know what numbers we're looking at. Likewise, I see no point in 
determining right now whether experimental cmavo space expands into xVV 
or CV'V'V first. Right now, both xVV and CV'V'V are equally 
experimental, and there is no baseline reason making official xVV any 
less or more a disruption than official CV'V'V. Making xVV official 
first is Bob's opinion, and it's what we'd always assumed we'd do. But 
I do not regard that opinion as binding. You and Jordan have raised 
alternatives worth considering; and we'll consider them.

A2. Splitting problematic cmavo into two official cmavo, one old and 
one new, is certainly one approach the BPFK can consider. It is not the 
only approach, and although you and Bob both favour it, it is not in 
fact my favoured approach.

A3-4. I am reluctant, for political reasons, to say that the set of 
cmavo shall remain open-ended. Nothing is preventing new cmavo becoming 
(a) official, if there is still a post-baseline body conferring 
officialness, or (b) de facto standard, if there is not. I understand 
that the constraints on cmavo space, and the stigma of experimental 
cmavo, make it desirable to expand official cmavo space now. I am 
sympathetic to this, but will not make any decision on my own, or 
before the BPFK is working. If the language goes feral naturalist, 
there will be no experimental/official distinction. If the language 
stays prescriptivist, then cmavo space can be expanded by later bodies. 
This latter possibility will be made easier by granting reasonable 
cmavo space, I agree; but this discussion can be deferred.

B1-4. Lojban may get concise, it may not. Preserving its syntax in 
recognisable form means it won't get very concise. And the way natural 
languages attain concision will make a mockery of Lojban phonotactics 
anyway. The God Zipf may or may not hold sway over the community in the 
years to come; but as has been  rightly pointed out, we cannot 
sacrifice current stability for a God to come. I favour Jordan's 
gradualist solution --- assigning double cmavo for known-to-be-dumb 
assignments, deprecating but not abolishing the old use; but again, 
this can be deferred until the BPFK considers cmavo in their entirety.

B5. I have always and always will feel that Lojban cannot and should 
not evolve 'naturally' --- and that Bob's proclamation of natural 
evolution has been a naive blunder that has compromised the formalist 
aims for the project (as opposed to his aims, which I have always 
considered eccentric.)

But it's fact now, and we are dealing with a community coloured by this 
'blunder'. No Change Without Consensus will not fly, IMO. Even allowing 
for the continuing existence of a BPFK-like body after the baseline 
(the Academy, in effect), was a major concession to extract; and I'm 
not sure it will in fact happen. But to switch to a prescriptivist 
future for Lojban, desirable or not, is not realistic, and not I 
believe legitimate grounds to reject the statement. The statement after 
all is an amplification of previous thinking (however misguided), not a 
repudiation.

C. And is advocating tighter semantics. I have advocated it --- though 
rarely practiced it. Lojban cannot be held to as tight semantic 
criteria as syntactic, because the semantics will simply not get 
formalised to a comparable level --- certainly not a statement of the 
semantics which will reach community consensus, as we intend the 
dictionary to be. It is clear to me that saying {pa} and meaning {re} 
is as much a violation of the Baseline as it stands (which does include 
semantics, even if elementally), as it is to say {le nanmu joi le 
ninmu}. And if I were to class which error is more pernicious, believe 
me, it wouldn't be the quirk of LALR parsing.

Your intent, I take it, is to force the community to pay more attention 
to getting semantics right. I agree, and enough Lojbanists do that the 
BPFK will come into being. If the current state of semantic 
specification were felt to be acceptable, people wouldn't want a 
'dictionary'; they'd be happy with a pretty-printed version of the 
current wordlists. (Going into the board meeting, that's all I thought 
we'd be doing, actually; the turn has been surprising.) But 
realistically, I do not expect a very formal semantics to arise out of 
this. More formal than what's currently there, sure. But not enough to 
satisfy either of us --- because it has to satisfy everyone else, too.

If you want a clausule saying that baseline compliance is not simply a 
matter of running Lojban text through a parser; we also need to make 
sure that the words are used in a standard way, well, sure, that's 
legit. But if anyone out there truly thinks running Lojban text through 
a parser is in itself a proof of baseline compliance, they're being 
doofuses.

This-all is not ex cathedra, because I fear some of you may be such 
doofuses. :-) But it certainly is my opinion, and I'm surprised it's 
controversial. We will need to ensure the semantic prescription is 
minimal enough to keep it uncontroversial. People can restrict the 
semantics further in their own works and on their own time; but the LLG 
dictionary, as a statement of standard Lojban, has to be acceptable to 
everyone. (Hence my 'watering down' approach to debate.)

D. Good thing you don't feel strongly about abolishing unintelligible 
cmavo. I do: I regard it as an intolerable baseline breaking. cmavo can 
only be nuked with overwhelming support, and I'd say when external 
factors make them nukable. I think Bob's example of duelling character 
standards cmavo is about the only good instance. I'm not ruling out 
nuking; but it would have to be held to an exceedingly high standard. 
Much higher than what Bob did with the rafsi.

4. Jordan's response (Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2002 19:10:10 -0600
Subject: Re: Comments on the New Policy)

gismu space is much more open, and later lojbanists may add gismu. I 
don't envision us doing so now, and my own bias is strongly weighted 
towards lujvo instead. But I would not want to rule out any 
non-destructive change in the language 10 years from  now; it's 
post-freeze, we don't know how the decision making will work then, we 
aren't running out of gismu space as we are cmavo space. So this is a 
non-issue, and it's good that noone is making it an issue.

5. Bob's exchanges with And

I'm not getting into this. I feel somewhat more affinity with And's 
position than Bob's, as people will have divined by now, but if I get 
into this I will end up screaming, and this benefits noone.

6. Other dissent.

Jorge, what were your objections to the freezes, and particularly the 
seals of approval? I'm not saying it to water the proposals down (you 
won't be surprised to hear my reaction to your definition of {xruti}), 
but since we may collide heads over this policy later, I am interested 
in hearing what your concerns are, at least to enable us to state the 
policy more explicitly.

7. Loglan

I got upset over this, which is my bad. I don't recant, but I note that 
And's concrete proposal is a lot more constructive than anything anyone 
else has had had to say on the topic, and ask Bob to consider it for 
action.

8. gismu

I recognise there are broken gismu, and the BPFK should clean them up. 
My current understanding of cleaning up gismu is, disambiguate 
ambiguous or ill-defined places. It does not extend to adding or 
deleting places. That's a bottomless pit, and we went through it 8 
years ago. We will not, in my opinion, go through gismu one by one. But 
if anyone has considered a definition problematic --- as Avital, Jorge, 
and I have brought up in the past year --- then the BPFK can consider 
it. Again, this exceeds the current brief slightly in the letter, but I 
believe it is consistent with its spirit. We might need board 
permission, though, as with the morphology clarification.

9. Jordan's ma'ei

Hm. If mu'ei is adopted, I would want it readily expanded to different 
logics, but I don't want a different cmavo for each one. Maybe ma'ai 
mi'ei mu'ei, mu'ai xi vo, with the modality of each stated 
metalinguistically (we already can use metalinguistic tags to 
disambiguate mex operators.)

But that's getting ahead of myself...

[Nick Nicholas.    French & Italian Studies,   University of Melbourne  
]
[        nickn@unimelb.edu.au            http://www.opoudjis.net        
]
[There is no theory of language structure  so ill-founded that it 
cannot]
[be the basis for some successful Machine Translation. ---  Yorick 
Wilks]


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