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

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Sep 2001 10:07:48 -0400

At 01:32 AM 9/22/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>Lojbab:
> > At 12:31 PM 9/20/01 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > >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".
> >
> > Rather, I would expect "there is no way to say this that isn't mildly
> > verbose or hopelessly confusing. I want to say it and be understood, so I
> > will say it verbosely."
>
>That's what I would expect too. Because -- as natlangs show -- people are
>such good glorkers, hopeless confusion will be relatively rare, and hence
>verbosity for the sake of precision will also be rare. So my point stands:
>unless special efforts are made to encourage precision over concision
>for a while, usage will not provide evidence of where zipfing would be
>required.

The assumption in Loglan/Lojban has always been to design for Zipf but in 
natural language, we can SEE that Zipfean solutions have been taken in 
usage - that is, after all, what acronyms and abbreviations are as well as 
jargon. We can also see Zipfean grammar changes in natural language.

In Lojban we should be able to see patterns in how people make grammatical 
errors in trying to be brief. We will see questions arise on "how to say 
it" that usually amount to "how to say it and not take 500 words", and 
we'll see where misunderstandings arise when Zipf has run us afoul.

Furthermore, there will be times when imprecision won't do (such as when 
people are talking about something important and don't want to be 
misunderstood). There we will see less reliance on Zipf tendencies, and be 
able to compare what is said in such situations, with what might have been 
said otherwise.

These are of course things that will not be as noticeable until people are 
using the language predominantly subconsciously. At this point, most 
people worry about "how to say it" on even the simplest things, so that 
they give more thought than a natural speaker would. But I think recorded 
Lojban speech (as from xod's conversations here at LogFest) could be 
contrasted with written usage to give us evidence.

> > Why not? The evidence will not be limited to actual verbose and clunky
> > usages, but will also include places where people ellipsized and
> > were/weren't understood, as well as experimental cmavo that will have been
> > tried to deal with clunkiness.
> >
> > Stylistic elegance that fails to communicate something is still evidence.
>
>To briefly resummarize my point: concision will always prevail over precision,

But it doesn't. Read a scientific paper or a government regulation, and 
they are written with more precision and care. Read a conversation record 
and there is less. Compare the two, and you will see what people have a 
tendency to shorten.

>The antithesis of
>precision is not misunderstanding but rather glorking; for it to be precise,
>meaning must be decoded, and glorking is the opposite of decoding.

No. Because if it is truly semantically ambiguous, which will sometimes 
happen, then glorking will fail. They would not have discovered garden 
pathing and other linguistic effects in natlangs if glorking did not fail 
sometimes.

But you may be correct in that some problems may take a LOT of usage to 
see, and we may not get that usage even in 5 years.

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