Re: [lojban] Re: How it should have been. And how it could be.

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

The grant was for compiling the dictionary and maybe some checking the 
"readability scores".




----- Original Message ----
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Fri, June 24, 2011 4:02:21 PM
Subject: 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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