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

[this response was largely overcome by the way the thread proceeded, but was written before I had read the rest of the thread. I am more or less satisfied with what others said, but figured that what I had written in response to the original post might still be of interest] 

And Rosta wrote:

Robin Lee Powell, On 05/01/2011 16:52:

Lojban is *FAR* more fully defined than Esperanto.
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). Esperanto is defined only (B)-wise. There are some Lojbanists, such as Lojbab, who would prefer a (B)-wise definition for Lojban too, 

lojbab wants both.  A revised baseline to serve as (A), followed by
"naturalization" a la (B).  After (B) exists, (A) can still have a
normative role, but linguists would probably be more interested in how
(A) and (B) differ.
But nor does Lojban. Lojban's so-called formal grammar does nothing but define a set of structures of phonological strings. What a real grammar would do is define a set of correspondences between sentence forms and sentence meanings. 

That makes the assumption that "meaning" is a grammatical concept.


4.  Nobody shouts "Wow this is well specified!!!" at the top of
their lungs, but they certainly shout their complaints.  Geeks have
a shared culture that compliments are private and insults are
public; it's deeply fucked up.  See
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
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 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".


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.

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 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".

lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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