Subject: Re: [lojban] Response ro Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"
Bob LeChevalier, On 10/04/2010 09:22:
> I'm not particularly appreciative of art for its own sake. I know
> others are, but I am me. People who invent conlangs that they do not
> intend people to use, engaging in "the secret vice" - I recognize they
> are doing something they love and they are often quite talented and
> gifted people. But I feel none of that myself, and think that mindset
> is poison to something like Lojban, where it is important, indeed vital,
> to several goals, that it be used, skillfully, by people.
I think the Logban project's goal is a work of science rather than art. A good analogy would maybe be a group whose aim is to produce an awesome piece of open-sourced software, from whose design we could learn much and from whose use the world could benefit. You'd want the software to be used, but others would be free to modify the code for their own ends, and you wouldn't baseline inadequate code just in order to gain users.
>> And anyway, you've missed the point in various ways. The fact that a
>> language is a set of rules (definitional rules, not rules regulating
>> behaviour) does not entail that nobody uses the rules or that nobody
>> wants to use them.
>
> I disagree with the definition.
Nevertheless, such a definition does not entail the conclusions you drew from it.
> > The Lojban language itself is a failure as a logical language,
>
> Not as JCB defined the phrase.
That's true (I believe), but it is a failure as a logical language under the prevailing understanding of the phrase (encoding logical structure unambiguously in a speakable way), and it's that prevailing understanding that attracts many to the Logban project in the first place.
> And I was dealing with academic linguists who associated artificial
> language solely with that sort of thing, or with Esperanto evangelism. I
> fought hard, for several years, to neutralize that negativism, and I
> think I succeeded - Lojban has managed a couple of academic citations,
> and I started getting enough positives in correspondence and at
> interactions at a couple of linguistic conferences I attended, that
> people started thinking we were bona fide and serious about making
> Lojban linguistically credible. (Getting called Dr LeChevalier was a
> bit of egoboo, even if the title is unearned.)
The massive increase in public visibility of invented languages in the last twenty years has noticeably increased tolerance of their existence.
I understand that what JCB alleged to be his original vision for Loglan, i.e. an experimental Sapir-Whorf test, (and I remain skeptical about whether this aim ever received more than mere lip-service from him) necessitated the involvement of academic linguistics in assessing the outcomes of the experiment. So I understand why you felt you had to recruit the interest of linguists. But I see several different ways in which the experiment failed in its design and execution, and no right-minded linguist would study it from this perspective. (They might study it as a failed experiment -- where and why things went wrong -- or as a social phenomonon -- the desire of a bunch of people to work together to create the experiment.)
> The trouble is, to the linguists I've
> dealt with (excepting you, since you just self-identified as one in
> another post), Lojban is not YET a success as a language period, and
> won't be a language until it has a native speaker community.
>
> I've been able to talk with some such people and bring them around to
> ways that they might consider Lojban linguistically interesting without
> being a proper "language". But it always requires demonstrable and
> probably fluent usage for communication.
98% of the interest in Lojban shown by professional linguists has been mine (or mine and pycyn's if he counts himself as a linguist), so you might consider whether to give more weight to my views... (I can think of decent reasons not to, mind, such as my eccentricity and my opinion that Lojban isn't ripe for interesting academic research.)
I of course wasn't privy to your conversations with linguists, but I suspect part of linguists' response might have been a polite brush-off, and part might have been based on taking at face value Lojbanists' claims about the language, without checking the veracity of those claims (and finding it lacking). It's true that for many linguists a language would become worthy of study only when it demonstrably being used as languages are used; but the same would go for any invented language, and Lojban would be of no more interest than Klingon or Toki Pona or Esperanto. I think also that the responses you'd have got from linguists would have been a function of the way you made the case for Lojban being of interest; you've never cared about the logical language aspects or shared my vision of the value and scholarly interest of such a thing.
--And.
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