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Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update

On 5/25/2014 2:06 PM, Dustin Lacewell wrote:

      25 years now, and I never made any effort to learn place
    structures systematically.

This is a thoughtless retort.


It is a truthful one.


The suggestion that there is truly no objective sense of efficiency, rhyme or reason to a place structure is
unmoving.
There may be such a thing, but you have no more access to it than I do. And I have more interesting things to worry about. 


The idea that an efficient place structure has anything to do
with memorizing gismu systematically doesn't follow.


The idea that I give a damn about either, also doesn't follow.


    For a language user, rather than a designer, why would you choose to
    memorize a gismu (place structure) that follows a common pattern but
    which never actually comes up in your conversation, over a useful
    brivla where the place structure matters?

Another retort that doesn't connect with the original statement. In fact
this retort makes zero sense whatsoever. Why would anyone pick a gismu
that follows a common pattern but never comes up in your conversation?
Back in the day, I picked some 1300 gismu that had never come up in my conversation, because no one at that time spoke Lojban. A large chunk of those words were gismu in TLI Loglan, and their initial place structures were more or less the same that JCB used, except where we had a good reason to change. But JCB's gismu and place structure choice were often quite arbitrary, too. 

Efficiency was never a priority.


This is just not a thought-out reply.
You expect me to spend more time thinking about this stuff than I already have? 


You're not even trying.


You are right.


To suggest that there is no meaningful way to semantically categorize the gismu
I suggest no such thing. There are lots of ways, but how meaningful they are is a subjective question. 


for the utility of helping us
partition the work, one has to wonder what your actual intention in this
reply is.


Ridicule?


Furthermore, the process is democratic


Most of the Lojbanic world isn't involved in your process and won't be.


and so those associations are completely open to discussion.


Most people have no interest in such a discussion.


        No.

        First of all, lujvo don't change, since they mean what are
        defined to mean.

    Who decides what they are defined to mean?
At this point, either the person who uses one, or the person who enters it into jbovlaste or some other word collection. 


    In reality, the meaning of lujvo is not and cannot be prescribed.

In reality. Sure, if you say so. Except that we have a dictionary
I have never seen a published Lojban dictionary. If you refer to jbovlaste, it isn't a dictionary, but rather a data base, and I don't believe its collection has any official status. 


where
explicit lujvo place structures are created mindfully and voted on
democratically.
I have never been aware of, nor involved in, any such vote. I suspect that this is true for most of the community. 


    Or perhaps start using the place you've been skipping - you know:
    allowing the language to structure the way you think about things.
      The language was after all originally designed to test the
    Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.


This actually made me chuckle out loud. You're not even trying to create
strong replies


Correct.  selpa'i is hardly worth such an effort, even if I had the time.


that aim at the content to which you are replying. Use
places that are not relevant to the speech, just because they come
earlier in the place structure? What are you even *talking about* Bob?


Maybe we don't speak the same language.


    Your "semantic groupings" sound very much like your personal natural
    language conventions.  I rather suspect that a native speaker of a
    language quite unlike yours would consider different "semantic
    groupings" more important than yours, and perhaps will find places
    useful that you prefer to skip, because in their native language,
    different assumptions about the world have shaped the meaning of words.

Bob, we're not making natlang arguments
Then you aren't talking about language. Lojban will never be recognized by real linguists as being a real language, if it doesn't have certain traits that they define as necessary. 

Maybe you don't care.  Your choice.


Hubris on our part is one way to look at it. I'll say that hearing this
critique from someone who has throughout this entire dialog minimized
and insulted something he cannot even really perceive, being so far
removed from the life of the daily lojbanist and who cannot even speak a
dialect of lojban understandable by anyone having learned the language
in the last 5 years is certainly not going to evoke the any feeling of
legitimate and genuine criticism in us.


.u'inai .ionai


What an interesting demonstration is all that one can really think, as
we know who we are,


You may know, but the rest of us don't.


To see you attempt this coloring while all the while
knowing that the very audience you speak to is mostly supportive


Evidence is lacking.


    in *your* opinion consistent, and in *your* opinion easy to learn.
      Of course you have no actual basis for that opinion, only some
    untested assumptions about what sorts of things make learning
    easier, and place structures more consistent.

This is where you truly show that you have no idea what's going on
beneath you. You believe that we are simply tinkerers


Yes.  You talk like all the tinkerers before you.


But the truth is, the IRC community


You are you.  You are not the IRC community.  You speak only for yourself.


is one of the most active communities Lojban has


Yet no one is ever there most of the times I log in.
(I'm not saying that no one uses IRC; I see a long list of bots logged in, but people don't respond to what I say, so I don't bother very often. 


No one buys the "selpa'i and his rag tag IRC community is just a small
ignorant rebel group looking to destroy the language argument. Ask some
of the people around you.
selpa'i also is not "the IRC community" and does not have any authority to speak for them. 


      and they *won't* have to relearn anything.

    Of course they will.  You think you will be the last person to come
    along and argue for a new improved gismu list?  This comes up every
    few years.  And if we ever said "yes" to a single one, we surrender
    all moral authority to oppose the next dozen attempts.

We're not coming up with anything.


Good.  Then no one has to bother with you.


    Whoopie.  Anecdotal evidence based on personal experience.  Let me
    know when a linguistics journal accepts your paper based on that
    "experience".

This a joke.


I guess I forgot the zo'o


        and making slight adjustments in gismu place
        structures results in a big increase in pleasantness of use.
        This may
        not be the case for you, but it is for some.

    And why should your personal aesthetics preferences count more than
    mine?

The process is open for anyone to make arguments for or against the
proposed changes of others or their own.


There is no process.


    Sometimes.  And sometimes the semantic experiencer is in x3 or x4 or
    x5.  And probably in some lujvo, in x8.

    And it is just as fundamental to understanding Lojban conceptually
    that a beginner be able to cope with an experiencer in x8 as in x1
    or x2. (Of course a beginner is far less likely to run into such a
    word these days.)

Only someone who doesn't care about the on-going proliferation of the
language would say something like this.


Maybe I care rather differently than you, and for different reasons.


    I am quite aware of the requests of beginners.  I have after all
    been teaching the language longer than anyone else.  And, I don't
    reply that way.  If someone is a beginner, I wouldn't be trying to
    explain the language using gismu that you don't know how to use.
      Beginners aren't going to be able to use the whole language with
    facility.

Do you feel that your response actually connects with the content of
what you're replying to?


I have no idea. selpa'i seldom makes much sense to me.


That you are disagreeing with the goal of
having examples justifying the design of every place in the gimste is
unproductive
We haven't managed the much smaller goal of a set of examples for every cmavo. Why worry about a larger and less important goal?
I don't see any need to "justify the design of every place in the gimste". I can freely admit that many decisions were arbitrary, and further I assert that any "justification" is arbitrary. It simply doesn't matter, because gismu are not semantically privileged above lujvo, I rather doubt that you expect to justify every place of every lujvo. 


rather than exceedingly legitimizing and of much utility to
jbopre at any level is astounding, really.


The utility has yet to be seen much less demonstrated.


    But even ignoring that, if some people want a strongly prescribed
    language and others do not, we have a fundamentally intractable
    contradiction, and cannot please everyone.  So we follow the
    concepts under which the project was started and under which it has
    survived 25 years

Lojban as language used by actual people, is inevitably a language that
changes naturally adapting to the needs of the users as those needs
arise and inspiration provides workable solutions. The idea that lojban
can ever be truly prescribed can in no way ever be enforced or otherwise
implemented.
Sounds like what I argued in response to Robin in the discussion cited by selpa'i. 

I guess you don't really agree with selpa'i


Any prescription is only useful as a reflection of usage.
Then it is really a *description*, not a prescription. People can use descriptions prescriptively, but that doesn't make them prescriptions. 


In the context of actually having some LLG support this is ironic.


Your support is not in evidence.


    I can't please your ilk, and I'm not inclined to try, even if I
    didn't have that LLG members' motion directing me not to do so.

    You got yourself onto the TLI Academy (JCB's likely turning over in
    his grave about that) - they accept the possibility of prescribing
    everything.  Good luck over there.

I just can't even begin to understand your disposition.


JCB had a problem with people who challenged authority, shall we say.


    *You* aren't the "community of users", and you and your friends are
    only a tiny subset of that community, if what you are using still
    fits the label "Lojban".  Lojban has stayed alive for many years
    before you came along, and will stay alive just fine without you,
    and might even do better, since more people will understand that we
    aren't going to support or even cooperate with every splinter group
    that announces itself.

You know what? We are the community of users.


You speak only for yourself until proven otherwise.


Lojban stays alive in large part BECAUSE of the efforts of this
community to maintain it from the practical reality and not some
completely disconnected banal nostalgia of yesteryear's hopeless
agendas. Ask some people around you if they agree.


Alas, no one around me uses IRC.
I fully respect people who use the language on IRC, for doing so. But they are still not above other Lojbanists who never have done so. 

lojbab

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