Re: [lojban] mistakes

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Tales about Loglan are basically true; JCB was the final authority on everything 
and deviations were "corrected" onsite (The Loglanist).  There was eventually 
enough internet that most of this could be done fairly rapidly, but it still 
waited on JCB's pleasure.
As for praising execrable Lojban, I think the principle was simply "Something is 
better than nothing."  And, of course, the warm emotions one got from correcting 
ad infinitum each piddling error.  There remains, however, the overarching fact 
that Lojban is meant to be uniquely parsable and that many (most?) deviations -- 
except vocabulary selection, perhaps -- make the result unparsable or wrongly 
parsed for the intended meaning.  We override that by context and the other 
devices of natural languages, but the sentences as they stand are not good 
Lojban in a strict sense.  But they may still be good Lojbanic conversations.


----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, October 22, 2010 9:17:14 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] mistakes

Stela Selckiku, On 22/10/2010 14:26:
> 2010/10/22 Jorge Llambías<jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>>
>> But of course it's allowed to make mistakes in Lojban! How could it
>> not be? The only people who make no mistakes are those that don't ever
>> use the language.
>
> Well that was the rule, for years!  No one was allowed to speak
> Lojban.  Not without weathering severe criticism, anyway!

I've been around since 1990 or 1991. For all the time that I've been around, 
speakers and writers of Lojban have been feted and lauded. Severe criticism was 
reserved only for those who either knowingly departed from the baseline or 
adhered to the baseline but violated usage conventions (by writing in a sui 
generis style). It's true that mistakes were invariably corrected, but 
scrupulous and finicky correction of mistakes is not severe criticism.
  
> I hear it was even worse before I was involved, like the Loglan days.
> I read something the other day about how everyone sent their attempts
> at Loglan to JCB, and he just didn't send them on to anyone else
> because he didn't think they were good enough, they were all just
> hidden away, and like one person wrote a text and published it anyway
> but JCB was furious!  Is that really what it was like, oldbies?

I've never been involved with Loglan, but I can certainly sympathisize with the 
desire to suppress, or at least conceal, most usage. Maybe things have improved, 
but at least for the duration of the 90s, Lojban usage was absolutely execrable, 
comparable perhaps to the average Anglo schoolchild's command of French (or 
whatever foreign language they learn at school). I am here measuring 
execrability by the distance and discrepancy between the meaning of what is said 
and the meaning that the speaker intends to communicate. I guess xorlo has gone 
a long way to fixing a lot of this. But at any rate, if almost your entire 
corpus of usage consists of the usage of incompetent foreign-like speakers, I 
would have thought it should be deprecated rather than worshipped, though 
everybody else in my day seemed to take the opposite view.

--And.

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