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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 12:31:04 +0100

>>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 09/19/01 11:43pm >>>
At 01:33 PM 9/19/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
#>I know this, and it's clear that a pioneering loglang can't foresee everything
#>that needs to be zipfed down. What I mean is that even when usage shows
#>what needs to be zipfed down, we then have no way to do the zipfing.
#>The morphology affords us no spare class of short cmavo,
#
#What do you think was the point/intent of the experimental cmavo space, if 
#not precisely to deal with this. There aren't a lot of "short" cmavo, but 
#"short" is relative here - there are 4 xVVs and 25 xV'Vs and we ultimately 
#have the option of using the last few unused cmavo in regular cmavo 
#space. It hasn't been made clear that there are that many Zipfean 
#shortenings that are so commonly used as to warrant the shortest forms in 
#the language.  

My sense is that people avoid cumbersome locutions because they are 
cumbersome, so on the whole you'd only get usage of them if we actually 
said to the community "In your usage, please don't try too hard to achieve
conciseness -- say what you wish to say ignoring its clunkiness, and then 
in the light of this we will add to the language zipfean shortenings".

#No doubt, if usage proved such to be the case, then 
#postbaseline revision would find a few of the lerfu and Mex words that 
#Jorge despises, being displaced by things that have proven more useful.

This is quite a radical change. Some of those may have been learnt and
used already. I doubt that our conservative constituency would stand
for it.

#>and the Lojban
#>project has not countenanced a stage at some point in the future when
#>zipf adjustments are made.
#
#Of course we have. That is exactly the sort of thing that I expect will be 
#discussed after the baseline period ends (discussion not necessarily 
#leading to change, but certainly considering it). I just don't want to 
#discuss it until then, because we would need the usage information to make 
#such decisions, and I want the decisions based on a more widespread Lojban 
#use than would likely exist if we continued to talk about tinkering.

I think that our usage is likely to be guided by whether or not we view it
as testing the language prior to the consideration of further revisions. Most
people quite legitimately care more about stylistic elegance than about
precision, and unless the notion is prominent in the culture that for 
the time being it is a virtuous and necessary phase in the language design
process to ignore stylistic considerations pertaining to brevity, we will not
get the necessary evidence for where zipfing is required. Either that or
we encourage people to experiment with using their own zipfing experimental
cmavo, possibly with concomitant grammar changes, and then see which
experimentals catch on.

#>I have, though, seen one indication of zipfing down of lujvo:
#>
#> tilju x1 is a pedant [Adjective pedantic] (This was made by 
#> shortening the
#> lujvo tilju'edu'u, which is perhaps the most 'proper' word for this 
#> concept)
#>
#>http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?Slang%20gismu 
#
#That is a suggested slang term. Has it actually seen usage?  

I don't know. I guessed it was supplied by Michael, a User par excellence.

#I have little 
#respect for wild suggestions that aren't actually used, especially since 
#"terki" and a couple other old Loglan creations (there was one gismu coined 
#for x1 encroaching on x2's personal "space", as I recall). We might also 
#encode gismu for all the unique Laadan concepts as well by the same logic.
#
#But proposals without actual usage to back them are empty.

Having them up there in black and white (or blue and beige) on the wiki
gives them a kind of lexicographical legitimacy that might encourage 
their usage. If you wanted to see it enter usage, the most effective strategy
would probably be to put it on the wiki and use it and add to the wiki a
full corpus of its usage.

--And.