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Re: [lojban] Re: How it should have been. And how it could be.
Muhammad Nael wrote:
-I was asked at school to work on a /complete/ short story to submit by
the beginning of next year, that is the soon-to-come reason for the
question. The same story but with different characters, plot and ending
(hard to swallow!) exists currently as a draft on my PC, and that is the
long-term reason for the same question. Being an SF story in the future,
I was curious about how the current Lojban community see the future of
Lojban, or what would they change if they're going to start an entirely
new project based (or not) on Lojban as a template.
Being one of those with the "vision" to reform Lojban as a split from
the TLI language, I would have to doubt that a redesigned Lojban would
be the basis for a community. Slightly more plausible might be a space
colony or something that adopted Lojban as the common language, but
there is no especial reason why the language would be reformed for that
purpose.
Designing a language of the scale of Lojban from scratch is a BIG
project. We've been at it for almost 25 years if you ignore the 30
years spent on Loglan before that. And the ONLY impetus we had for
starting over were the policies and legal threats from language inventor
JCB. "Building a better Lojban" simply isn't enough. And building a
"better" Lojban than we have now would be harder than the time, because
we've set the bar higher.
The one other impetus I can imagine is a large funding source (which you
asked about anyway). Getting funding for any sort of artificial
language project "from scratch" would be extremely difficult. JCB tried
and got one small NIMH grant in the early 60s, but no one even knows
what it was for, and the language while then rudimentary wasn't
restarting from scratch. It is plausible that someone with a particular
application in mind might seek (and pay for) a specialized revision of
Lojban in order to achieve a specific goal. Another guy and I proposed
seeking funding from Reagan's SDI "Star Wars" initiative to do some sort
of Loglan application, but JCB was rabidly anti-Reagan and
anti-militaristic and rather vehemently and colorfully buried that idea
in about 20 seconds. Of course, it is pretty impossible to figure what
would be different in such a funded language project, since it would
completely depend on whatever application was being paid for, and the
constraints of the requirements.
A German has proposed using Lojban as the basis for the European patent
system. Such a purpose would tend to promote certain aspects of the
language over others, in the need for specialized technical and legal
terminology and the desire to avoid cultural artifacts and ambiguous
semantics. No redesign was contemplated, but such adoption would
probably bring about some funding to produce the necessary materials,
and producing them would undoubted skew the language in certain
directions. This would be evolutionary based on what the language is
now, not a redesign - no "real" application would pay for a redesign
that would take longer and not necessarily produce anything more usable.
So the best way to project Lojban into the future is to think in
language evolution terms. Imagine such a space colony as I mentioned,
and presume that the colony is populated largely by people with Arabic
and other Asian languages rather than the primarily English-centric
group that dominates the language now. How might they use the language
differently, for communications commonality among peoples of a very
different set of language heritages and cultures - say Arabic, Hindu,
Farsi, or pan-Africa - adopting Lojban because it is neutral between
those cultures. Different cultures and the novel environment would each
lead to demands on the language that we cannot foresee, and the
non-inclusion of Americans or English speakers might lead evolutionary
forces to avoid anything that seems like an English-language artifact or
borrowing.
But that kind of extrapolation isn't easy, and it would be driven by a
lot of thought about how the community speaking it would differ from any
present Lojban community, and what sort of cultural attitudes they might
have towards what had gone before. And I am still talking evolution
rather than redesign.
From the standpoint of stories, I do want to call your attention to the
fact that Loglan was in fact used as the basis for writings by at least
three SF writers. JCB himself wrote a science fiction utopian novel, in
which Loglan was the common language. Robert Rimmer (most known for
"The Harrad Experiment") in the early 70s wrote a different utopian
novel again with Loglan as the spoken language. And noted SF author
Robert Heinlein twice mentioned Loglan in passing as being a language
used for humans to talk to sentient computers, in The Moon is a Harsh
Mistress, and (IIRC) Friday. But nothing in these novels suggested
anything was different from the then-current version of the language.
(Heinlein's concept was more limited than what we actually achieved).
(There have been other writers who have communicated with me about using
Lojban in science fiction stories or movies, at least one of whom was a
published author, but none of them have communicated with me that they
finished anything, so I have no idea how they might have conceived the
language).
-I looked at the visual alphabet, and I think it would be an awful idea
to try implementing it as is; its letters can so easily be confused if
you put them as clusters, if you put them as individual components then
you're asking the beginners to learn the science of morphology; and if
they pronounce a letter different from the original pronunciation,
Lojban loses its unique sound-to-letter mapping. In a word, I'd
Tolkien's /tengwar/ over Graham Bell Sr.'s /visual alphabet/, bearing in
mind that I recommend neither.
I have to go, will follow up.
A lot of people have talked about different visual representations of
Lojban, but until the current concept of the keyboard disappears, I
don't think that the Roman alphabet could be displaced. Other than
aesthetics, there is too little advantage to any change (remembering
that even alternate keyboards like the Dvorak keyboard which are
objectively much better than the standard QWERTY version used in the US
can't gain a significant following). Actually, I think that analogy
works for the language itself in your project described above. You need
to postulate a reason why a new language version would displace the
status quo, and being "better" simply isn't good enough.
Hope all this is helpful.
lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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