[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] Response to Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"
Stela Selckiku wrote:
On Sat, Apr 10, 2010 at 3:37 AM, Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:
On the other hand, Nora just said something that I think profoundly reflects
my misgivings. She's tried (far more than I have) to understand xorlo, but
she just can't get her mind around it. That makes her feel incompetent at
the language, which is the strongest demotivater for actually using it, much
less doing byfy work.
I agree that this can only be a sign that you've thought about it too
hard.
That tends to be what happens to people who work on language definition
for years %^(, (and especially those who participate in discussions with
xorxes on language definition - one HAS to think about it too much to
keep up with him %^)
> Under xorlo (which is the same as saying, with apologies to any
holdbacks, under modern Lojban) the meaning of the article "lo" (which
is the only one you need to learn to use) is simply "lo broda = zo'e
noi ke'a broda". In other words it's simply something that is an x1
of broda. Nothing more is specified.
Nora would have to speak for herself, but her misgivings extend to the
old loi/lei pair (and I won't pretend to know any more, because I have
no idea what xorlo did to them).
One thing to remember is that Nora and I used pre-xorlo in Lojban for
around 20 years, and Nora used the TLI Loglan articles for around a
decade before that. Our usage was ingrained, habitual, fluent (at least
with regard to choosing articles). Unlearning for us is non-trivial - I
still on occasion use the gismu "gumri", even though it was eliminated
more than 15 years ago.
A wiki page on each individual word! That. That is what I want. A
wiki is only one option, of course, but some sort of open forum
dedicated to each word. I would prefer to see it as a new, separate
project, clean, specific. (I suggest the name za'e "vlasnu".) I
could maybe be convinced that it could be hosted on the tiki or in
jbovlaste entry discussions, but so far it's seemed to me like the
organization and structure and vibe of those places isn't conducive to
the conversation I'd like to see.
Most importantly I'd like to encourage questions from new students
about particular words to be asked and answered in that forum. We've
discussed most of the words in Lojban repeatedly, in depth, but we've
lost those conversations to a lack of organization.
There was a concept proposed for preserving such conversations called
"The Elephant", pre-byfy. I'm not sure what happened to it, but it
never manifested.
I personally would like to see something you describe as the way of
addressing questions raised by newbies (or old-timers) post-baseline,
rather than having an academy-like byfy making formal decisions, and
possibly modifying the baseline.
Regardless of the last paragraph, I am not sure how such a project would
fit into the concepts in Robin's posting on documentation. Perhaps he
or someone else could speak to that.
My perspective on it is: I'm glad to talk informally
in English about what I think the words mean, or attempt to specify
them carefully in Lojban,
If someone were to try to add a careful Lojban definition of a word to a
tiki webpage on the word, that would be a valuable long-term addition,
Pragmatically, for the pages to be useful, we would probably want to
keep English definitions and discussions separate from Lojban (though
the two could perhaps cross-reference each other - I don't know the
limits of hyperlinking in wikis).
but having to try to craft a brief yet
On a wiki page, I don't think that they have to be brief. Obviously,
there has to be an extract thereof which is of reasonable printable
length for inclusion in a dictionary.
unambiguous English definition,
There is no such thing, so trying to write one is of uncertain virtue.
As I said in another post, the idea of byfy was to produce something
"good enough" for the cmavo list, for a definition of "good enough"
comparable to that implicit in the gismu list and CLL (leaning towards
the latter, which was later).
The gismu and cmavo lists were originally designed for use in the
LogFlash flashcard program and were not intended to be baseline items,
nor the primary source for the dictionary.
For gismu and cmavo, the primary things were the lojban word and the
English keyword, which had to be as short as possible because they were
memorized and typed (without misspelling) multiple times by the learner,
and the English keywords had to be uniquely deterministic of one Lojban
word, rather than definitional. The full place structures were included
as a third field because we did not want people to think that the
keyword they were typing was a real definition, and we wanted people to
be continually exposed to the idea that Lojban brivla are predicates
linking multiple sumti. They were displayed in full as part of the
English to Lojban (recall) prompt, and computer limitations led to fixed
length fields of the current length.
cmavo "descriptions" (they were never really considered "definitions")
were given because the cmavo keywords rarely were enough by themselves
to make the Lojban word clear, usually being chosen to be quickly typed,
and thus somewhat more of a English-based "code" for the Lojban. The
descriptions and keywords had the same length to keep the Logflash
programming simple, and maintainable when we had versions for gismu,
rafsi, and cmavo.
The rafsi were included on the Lojban-to-English (recog) prompt to help
them be learned, but also to enable the same file to be used for the
rafsi/lujvo-making version of LogFlash.
(All three LogFlash programs were produced, and still exist, but I think
only Nora and I ever used the cmavo program to mastery, and only I used
the rafsi/lujvo program, and not to the point of mastery.)
It was only when I failed to produce a "real" dictionary within a year
or two, while people were concerned about having an unchanging language
to learn, that we basedlined the LogFlash lists as the definitive
statements of gismu, cmavo, and rafsi, until a dictionary was produced.
People were using the lists in lieu of a dictionary (and we were
distributing them as being the best lists we had).
But of course the cmavo were never defined. Trying to define them into
dictionary form, Cowan and I started producing a "selma'o catalog"
defining the selma'o in a standard way, which could be used in defining
the cmavo in each selma'o without excessive redundancy and verbosity.
The selma'o catalog eventually grew into CLL (with the catalog found in
chapter 20). When CLL was done, neither Cowan nor I had the time or
energy to define all the words (both of us had school-age kids, and I
was bogged down in order fulfillment, trying to keep the mailing list
uptodate and are businessy stuff, none of which I was good at)
> well, that's just the sort of thing I
came to Lojban to avoid. :P Not that I don't think that's work worth
doing, but I'm not the person to do it, as I can't get my head around
it.
If people can write non-brief definitions, I think it wouldn't be that
hard for a dictionary editor to turn them into usable brief definitions.
And the silent majority is still silent; many of them are like Nora,
and unable to keep up with the traffic.
Would you please ask Nora, and anyone else without the time to follow
our main forums, if they would please consider tuning into Lojbanistan
some other way?
In Nora's case, especially trying to support me resuming the presidency,
staying with the main show is the only feasible option.
Gary Burgess, another co-founder, raising a young grandson and an older
teen while working a lot of overtime, doesn't even have time for that.
If he could consistently spend 15 minutes a week on Lojban, he would be
lucky. Nothing in the community really supports the sort of people who
have time for Lojban only a few times a month (or less). So he usually
spends no time on it, except when I bring him up to date with a
phonecon. (Doing such stuff as Lojban while at work is professionally
verboten, even if they had the time).
If we ever found a way to produce a good digest of the main list (which
would require a heavy-handed but neutral editor), to reduce the reading
load to a small fraction of the current effort, going elsewhere a little
more often might be possible. But neither Nora nor I do well with
web-based interfaces, coming from the unformatted, single-window,
text-only DOS era (actually Nora can do it, but it is too much like what
she does at work, programming in VB with heavy customer interaction).
We've both tried IRC (not recently), but rarely had the fortune to find
more than one other live reader (and rarely even that), and neither of
us can work with an occasionally changing or interrupting page in the
background (both of us are single-tasking fossils who don't work well in
"interrupt mode" - cell phones and text messaging drives me to
distraction even thinking about them), so if nothing is going on right
that moment, we aren't sticking around.
I dunno if it exists or even is possible, but a constantly available and
updating IRC log, where one would log in and see the last couple of
pages of discussion, regardless of how-long-ago it took place, would
help, especially if it were possible to search back further if a topic
of especial interest came up. (If volume were heavy, being able to
quickly look at what was being talked about last, an hour ago, 2 hours
ago, etc, would make it possible to keep up even if like Nora she can't
read more than once a day for a few minutes.) Turning an IRC channel
into a threaded newsgroup might work for me - you know I have
occasionally read and responded to you on Usenet.
We occasionally look at other Lojban sites, as well as the wiki, but
there is no single place where we can, in a short time (and for Nora
this means minutes per day on weekdays) keep the pulse of the language
community. (At one point, Nora and I tried to follow the latest-updated
and most-frequently-read links of the wiki, but I don't even know if
they exist anymore.)
lojbab
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.