Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 18:32:11 -0400

At 01:52 PM 9/16/01 +0200, G. Dyke wrote:
>Having been following the discussions more closely than usual these past few
>days (hey! waiting for college to start gets pretty uneventful during the
>last months, I've got a lot of time), I've come to the conclusion that I'm
>missing a lot of the discussions because I've got no background on this. For
>instance, are these words specific to americans and those who've known them
>a long time or have they come about through lojban : "fiat" (as in "fiat
>decides..."), "glorking", "glorkjunkied" (aha! the latter two are related),
>elephant. Why do some people support and reject {gumri} ? (Don't you dare
>tell me to go to the wiki, last time my telephone bill had trouble coming
>out alive %^).

That is one reason I have feared the splitting of the community into these 
multiple forums. The wiki seems to have introduced a whole new bunch of 
about-Lojban slang, and the relevant usage of all but one of those words 
you ask about seems to have been invented in the course of wiki 
discussions. Thus even >I< would not know what the words meant without 
reading the wiki.

"fiat" on the other hand is a standard English word roughly meaning "decree 
from legal authority", with a certain connotation that the decision being 
decreed is arbitrary. It seems in the above phrase to be contrasted with 
"usage decides", wherein the language design starts to move from being 
wholly prescriptive to wholly descriptive (and hence natural-language 
like), the latter being necessary at some point in order to use Lojban for 
most of the purposes people have had in mind for it.

Briefly, I think "glorking" or "glorking from context" refers to people 
determining what a Lojban text means as much from context as from rules, 
again a natural language process. A "glork-junkie" is one who feels that 
this should be the norm, and is contrasted with the "hardliners" that are 
seeking strict logical-semantic refinement in all aspects of the 
language. The Elephant is yet another web tool, one that John Cowan is 
working on, which will serve as a formal method of documenting positions on 
language design issues so that we can remember what has been decided 
without relying on my memory of (and agreement with) the decision. (The 
reference is to the folklore idea that "an elephant never forgets" - I 
don't recall the source of that bit of folklore).

Someone should be adding such terms to the Lojban glossary on the 
lojban.org web page, if they survive, but in many cases they seem to only 
be used a few times and then forgotten.

>I'm also puzzled by Nick (who, if I've got it right has spent
>one hell of a lot of time learning lojban) having views such as lojban never
>succeeding, rafsi not being a good idea and ... what else?

I'll let Nick speak for himself %^)

>I'd appreciate anyone who could help me by adding their beliefs and desires
>for lojban (and who could give any other information that might be relevant
>to newcomers - life around lojban-beginners is good but we want to graduate,
>there isn't the same element of risk involved in posting there as there is
>on lojban :-)

There is no real risk posting on this forum as compared to the other. I 
*LIKE* to read the postings by beginners. You remind me that the language 
community is still growing, and unlike a lot of the debates, I can 
understand what you write %^).

> Are there others who read the lojban-digest (not individual
>mails? surely!) avidely hoping to better their lojban, but not often
>putting their opinions forward because they're bound to lose against the
>sheer bulk of emails coming from opposers...

With 250 subscribers who have remained subscribing during the volume of the 
last couple of months, this must of course be the case.

>An example of something that took me ages to understand : xod no longer
>signs his emails so and doesn't have xod in his address ; how's a newcomer
>supposed to work out who is referred to in the sentence "xod said...".
>Another thing... it took me a month to work out that pycyn was lojban for
>PC - who's name I eventually found in the reference grammar. This is NOT
>your fault but it should give you an idea of how complicated life is...

We started to create a list of who's who in the Lojban community on the 
lojban.org website, but other than a couple of key names that are in the 
glossary, we relied on people adding themselves in. Some of the names are 
clarified on the wiki, but not all.

>Anyway, here's the list of information about me that might be useful, and
>that I'd like to know about you (so far I've worked out that you don't go
>arguing maths with pycyn - if you can help it - but knowing such things in
>advance might be useful)
>
>all of these are of course optional (as if you wouldn't tell me if this was
>not information that you'd put on www)
>
>Name: Gregory Dyke (greg.daik.) (which means sex : M ; what happenned to all
>the girls? I don't seem to have seen many! lol)

Bob LeChevalier aka lojbab, President of la lojbangirz. since it started 
back in 1987, and involved far more invisibly in Loglan since 1979 as a 
friend of language inventor James Cooke Brown (JCB). My wife Nora, is 
Secretary/Treasurer of LLG, doesn't read the list much, but is a co-founder 
of the Lojban effort, as well as the first "outsider" that JCB granted 
"member" status to in The Loglan Institute. She's been involved in Loglan 
since 1975.

>DOB:84/26/02 (see? you can put it whichever way you like)

On the other hand 53/11/07 is ambiguous, so I'll resolve it as 7 Nov 1953.

>Occupation: student, IT, EPFL, Switzerland

Occupation: parent, unemployed computer systems requirements analyst, 
sometime Lojban community leader

>Hobbies (things I do when I'm not doing smth else): skiing, programming,
>tolkien, his languages, lojban, working my way through w3c proposals (yep,
>the geeky type)

reading (especially SF/fantasy), computer games, history, debating 
education reform on the net, Russian language (non-fluent), linguistics and 
Lojban, fantasy role-playing (D&D), astronomy (my degree subject 27 years ago)

>What I think of lojban:

I've written enough about this in old JLs and on this forum, that people 
don't need to hear it again %^)

>I wish I could teach my kids (If and
>when I have any) lojban, but it would be a bit cruel - so I probably won't.

Better to teach your wife and use it as a language to talk privately in 
front of the kids, at which point they will insist on learning it %^).

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org