[lojban] Very belated report on the death of Jeff Prothero - a cofounder of Lojban

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

I discovered when looking him up on the net, that Jeff Prothero passed 
away back in 2016, and I am pretty sure no one said anything at the time.

Jeff Prothero, back when there was only one version of Loglan, was the 
first person AFAIK to come up with a complete formal YACC grammar and 
parser for TLI Loglan, back around 1980 while he was still a student at 
U of Washington.  Others had attempted to create a YACC grammar for 
Loglan starting back in 1976-1977 (notably, i think, Doug Landauer and 
Sheldon Linker), but Jeff was the one who figured out how to use YACC's 
error-correcting logic to achieve processing of the numerous elidable 
terminators in the language.  Scott Layson later took Jeff's work as the 
basis for the parser that became the official Loglan parser in 1982.

When Nora and I first split off from Dr James Cooke Brown, the inventor 
of Loglan and his organization The Loglan Institute, Inc., and we 
started trying to devise Lojban, Jeff was the one who got me started 
working on an updated YACC grammar.  JCB attacked both of us as 
violating the alleged copyright of the Loglan grammar and trademark of 
Loglan as a name of the language, and Jeff joined with me in legally 
challenging JCB's claims.  The copyright claim went away when Jeff 
pointed out that his work on the YACC grammar was as a student employee 
of the University, and hence could not be "owned" by anyone else without 
university release (which was never sought).  Jeff contributed 
significantly to the hefty legal fees we incurred challenging the 
trademark.

As part of all this, Jeff taught me what I could grasp of YACC 
grammar-writing, which eventually led to the official Lojban YACC 
grammar (Later contributors were Jeff Taylor, and of course John Cowan, 
who largely took over parser work from me in 1992-3, and produced the 
currently official YACC grammar in an appendix to CLL in 1997, an 
official parser derived from that grammar, and the E-BNF simplified 
version of the grammar which some people prefer.

While there have been attempts to devise other parsers for Lojban, 
especially for online use, and also to try to formalize more of the 
language than the basic grammar, I don't think anything ever reached the 
state of "approval" by BPFK, which still had the authority to do so 
until recently.  So in a sense, Jeff Prothero legitimately can be 
described as the "father" of Lojban's formal grammar

Jeff moved on to other pursuits besides Lojban after he moved away from 
Washington, as described in this Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynbe_ru_Taren

I kept occasional contact with him, but had not done so in the last few 
years after my health problems led me to reduce my Lojban activity.

I first read of his death, while answering a discussion question, from 
that Wikipedia article, and realized that few Lojbanists today even knew 
of Jeff Prothero and his immense contribution to Lojban, without which 
it might not have even been started, much less achieved the wide 
recognition that it now has.

This is an attempt to remedy that.

lojbab

Bob LeChevalier
Founder

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