Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: non-core translations

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2002 12:09:11 -0400

At 11:04 AM 8/7/02 +0000, Robert J. Chassell wrote:
> At 12:29 AM 8/7/02 +0000, Robert J. Chassell wrote:
> >and the end of the freeze period is coming up.
>
> My position is that the freeze continues until 5 years *after the three
> books have been published* (refgrammar, dictionary, and textbook), ...
>
>My apologies; my misunderstanding. I thought the intention was to end
>the freeze 5 years after the creation and publication of a stable
>grammar -- that 5 years would be enough time to discover the major
>problems and come up with acceptable solutions.

If that were the case, then the baseline would have already ended. The 
start of the final grammar baseline was at the end of December 1996, and 
the rest of the language was supposed to be nominally frozen except for 
typos and the like as of 6 months after that.

But the whole point of the freeze has always been to present a language 
that is stable and unchanging that people can seriously learn it. We've 
been told by some people that they cannot or will not learn the language 
until we publish a dictionary or until we publish a complete textbook, each 
of which is appropriate and necessary to certain kinds of learning 
styles. The 5 year period was based on my assumption at the (I think it 
was 1988 or 1989 that I first mentioned a 5 year freeze) time that it would 
take approximately that long from the time we had books to the time that we 
had a solid community of Lojban speakers and therefore could allow "natural 
language processes" to take over. When the baseline freeze ends, people 
might discuss (in Lojban) changes that they would like to see to the 
language, and maybe they will build a consensus for change. But I'm hoping 
that LLG will be effectively out of the language prescription business. So 
long as people think that we might change the language by decree rendering 
their prior learning moot (as JCB did several times), some will hold back 
from trying to learn the language.

>From the second-language learning studies I did as a result of adopting 
non-English speaking kids, I now know that it takes 5-7 years before even a 
school-age kid acquires full native competence in English (conversational 
native fluency takes 18-24 months, but academic native fluency is much 
harder). Lojban may be mastered more quickly than English, but I won't 
assume that it is. Thus, while I have no intention of dragging out the 
baseline period to "keep control", there is a theoretical reason for my not 
being entirely unhappy that it will persist more than 5 (and indeed more 
than 10 total if my interpretation holds) years.

Now as it turns out, the real burgeoning of Lojban speakers has just 
started. xod and Robin P. are of the opinion that we could conduct the LLG 
business meeting solely in fluent Lojban by 2005, which I find doubtful 
(that is academic and not conversational usage), but have no problem with 
people trying for it. But hopefully sometime in the next 5-7 years, we'll 
reach that critical mass of Lojban speakers such that discussion of the 
language in English (other than for teaching English speakers or presenting 
research papers to non-Lojbanists) will be itself "malglico". Then a 
freeze on the primarily-English-language design documents would no longer 
be meaningful, much less necessary. At that point, all language documents 
in whatever language should become descriptive rather than prescriptive, 
and the language will be completely in the hands of its users, which has 
always been the purpose for which I started work on Lojban.

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