Re: [lojban] Dr. James Cooke Brown

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>

At 08:03 PM 02/18/2000 -0600, Rex F. May wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, was any consideration ever
>given, in either project, to replacing i and u with
>y and w when they are to act as semivowels?

It was considered as part of the morphology redesign the first weekend that 
we started on Lojban, and rejected as being insufficiently vital a change 
when we were trying for minimal change from TLI Loglan and no questioning 
of JCB's design decisions.  We considered a lot of things, but the bottom 
line is that we felt that the goal was to change as little as possible and 
yet still have a "from first principles" implementation of Loglan that was 
on that algorithmic not subject to copyright.

We changed the set of permissible initials and medials to make things 
linguistically symmetric (and hence more algorithmic) - GMR had replaced 
the original symmetry by an irregular collection of permissibles, based on 
"taste tests" that we knew were biased by English speakers and reportedly 
by controversial statistical analysis (RAM was the person who had raised 
the controversy and is more qualified than I am to discuss it).

We added the apostrophe, and the corresponding close-comma for the 
syllable-dividing reasons I stated in another post.

Otherwise we avoided any change to the morphology.  We were not making a 
new or improved Loglan at that point, we were making a Loglan that 
reflected the existing design and the best linguistic knowledge we had as 
to how to implement that design in 1987.  We required systematization, but 
not improvement.

Several months later, we found an ambiguity bug in JCB's complex making 
algorithm, which he and I had written down in its then current form when I 
visited him in May 1986.  I have read nothing to indicate that TLI has ever 
corrected that bug in their version - presumably RAM knows.  (I'll provide 
details separately if anyone cares). Fixing that bug was the most 
significant change we made to the morphology after the start.

We rejected and reversed the late changes JCB had made to the borrowings 
morphology as inconsistent with what had gone before - these are the 
changes made for the "international vocabulary of science" which include 
things like doubled "r" that are not found elsewhere in the language which 
violate audiovisual isomorphism (clearly vocalic r is spelled differently 
in borrowings than in other word types).

The proposal to use y and w surfaced on occasion later, but always we found 
it to be one notch short of being a necessary change, and one which would 
make re-coalescing the two languages more difficult later (and such 
reunification was a major goal until JCB rejected our last attempt to 
negotiate after the court case was decided).

More importantly for such a proposal was that, other than for 
reunification, language stability was considered to be the utmost 
priority.  JCB never understood how many potential Loglan learners had 
turned away because something changed just as they had started learning, 
but that was the most common statement I received from old timers when I 
was trying to rebuild the community even before the split occurred.  I 
gained support from many old-timers after the split by committing us to 
ending the change cycles as early as possible.  As such, "improvement" was 
never really a factor in design decisions.  The goal was to fix only things 
that were "broken", and to do so in ways that we believe a non-antagonistic 
JCB would find acceptable and consistent with the original 
design.  "Broken" was always defined in terms of things JCB had himself 
written.  After around 1990, almost all changes to Lojban were expansions 
to increase functionality in new areas explored by usage, expansions that 
did not force any significant amount of relearning to the prior language.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)


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