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Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)

Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG, On 09/01/2011 11:39:

And Rosta wrote:

Natural languages are defined by what their speakers know (or do).
An invented language may be defined either (A) explicitly, by means
of formal grammars and suchlike, or (B), like a natural language,
by what their speakers know (or do).

[...]

The impressive thing is the vitality of the user community, and the
amount of labour folk have invested in it, not the specification.
It would be easy -- with the benefit of experience -- to improve on
the specification enormously, i.e. easy to design a language better
in every conceivable way. But it would be nigh-on impossible to
achieve a lojban-scale user-community for it.


But of course it would be impossible to actually complete such an
"improved specification" BECAUSE the user community wouldn't be there to
complete it. We've had a hard enough job completing (A) even with the
extremely robust user community and 20-odd years to play the game.
Doing a better (A) is likely no longer "easy", because Lojban's standard
for (A) is a pretty high bar to top.


I completely disagree. The Lojban design embodies several decades' worth of design ideas, all of which are too entrenched to change. Anybody doing the language over from scratch can keep the bits they can't improve on and replace the bits they can. Neither of us would claim that the language remains in its current state because its design cannot be improved on. (By "its design cannot be improved on" I mean "it is not possible to find a design that better satisfies the design goals of a logical language".)

Perhaps by (A) you are thinking of CLL and its thickness, whereas I am thinking more of the design itself. I certainly agree that it would be hard to replicate the monumental effort that led to CLL; it's the underlying design that I think could so easily be improved on. And it would be possible to come up with a design so much simpler that the documentation required for it could be much less. (Actually a lot of CLL is instructional rather than specificational, so its thickness is a bit of a red-herring.)

I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own vocabulary
knowledge.


It may well be that for any meaning you want to express, you have a way of expressing it and find that others will understand you.


Which is ultimately what language is all about.


This is not
the same thing, though, as it being possible to take your sentences apart and show *how* they mean what you think they do.


If there is one thing that "Chinese whispers" and other such games
should teach us, is that "meaning" is an extremely difficult question,
governed by far more than "grammar".


In order to avoid any annoying digressions into irrelevances about what meaning is and how it's governed by far more than "grammar", I will rephrase what I said into what I had hoped was the obviously intended sense: "This is not the same thing, though, as it being possible to take your sentences apart and show *how* they encode the logical formula that you think they do".


Saying that
it is very far from being complete and functioning is ridiculous,
and pretty insulting to a lot of people's hard work.


Whoever is insulted by that misunderstands what people's hard work
has achieved. The design of the language itself has little
intrinsic excellence (when viewed ahistorically),


TLI Loglan back in the 1980s was already described by someone as the
most successful committee effort in history. I'm not sure that is true
- the King James Bible sets a pretty high standard, but Lojban has far
surpassed what existed when we started.

But that isn't looking "ahistorically", you might point out? Yet you
conceded Robins claim:

We have already won that prize: Lojban is the most precisely,
formally specified language that there is, for any language with its
number of speakers or higher. Period. I challenge anyone to find
anything even *remotely close* to the CLL in terms of covering every
*possible* grammatical combination. Even if you can find such a
thing, the formal grammar takes it so far ahead of everything else
they can't possibly hope to catch up.


which is an ahistorical claim. To say that "far ahead of everything
else" is not "excellence" seems to be trying to define "excellence" not
only ahistorically, but unrealistically.


I'm not sure, from your comments, if you understood the points I was making. To restate them, in elaborated form:

1. The building of the Lojban speech community is a huge achievement. The building of the speech community necessitated design-by-committee, which also was a huge achievement. Of all languages with a comparable or larger user community, Lojban comes closest to being a logical language.

2. Technology moves on, as each generation of designs improve on the last. At one time, the Lojban design was cutting-edge techology, but nowadays we have learned enough to do much better. Lojban is rather like the qwerty keyboard layout; the mere fact that the design can be substantially improved upon is not enough to make a significant number of folk switch to an alternative (and certainly not to make them all switch to the same alternative, which fact makes it so much harder to decide to switch).


In short, until someone actually DOES produce a demonstrably more
excellent (A), claims that it would be "easy" to do so are indeed both
hollow and insulting.


The claim that the design of Lojban could be substantially improved upon is so transparently true that it is completely unreasonable to find it hollow or insulting. Indeed, the idea that, given the goal of creating a speakable predicate logic, the design of Lojban could be thought a near-optimal solution strikes me as near lunacy.

If you were thinking that I was claiming that it would be easy to write another CLL, then I agree that would have been hollow and insulting.

The language itself could not
have been substantially improved without great detriment to the user-community.


If you invent a "better language" but no one can/will use it, I contend
that it is not a "better language".


I expect we can agree that the success of designs for things can be assessed both by how well they achieve their design goals (e.g. fuel efficiency for an engine, etc.) and by how much they get used. By the one sort of criterion, Dvorak is more successful than Qwerty; by the other sort of criterion, Qwerty is more successful than Dvorak.

--And.

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