Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 16:56:15 +0200

Robert LeChevalier:
> >
> >I always wondered why it should be so. Why any language evolution should
> >spoil it?
>
> Because a large percentage of possible Lojbanists will utterly reject
> attempting to learn a language that they think will change on them. If
the
> changes are in the language prescription, this feeling seems to intensify,
> as evidenced by the history of Loglan/Lojban ("contact me if you ever stop
> fiddling with the language and start USING it"). Any change significant
> enough to render a statement in the reference work of choice (the word
> lists, CLL, and shortly Nick's lessons) incorrect, is sufficient to cause
> this despair.

I still maintain that the changes in question are so minor (at least the
ones I have read till now on the list), that they will hardly invalidate
anything. Besides, evolution will not make anything incorrect: it could
lead at worst to different style of expression.
Another point is that you seem to assume that most people interest in lojban
is stirred only towards practical use of the language. Considering the
people I read on the list (admitedly, that may not be really
representative), I would say that practical use is only one factor.

> The people in question find learning languages to be
> *painful* and relearning to be obnoxious. They also tend to be
> perfectionists who do not like to ever be incorrect. The Lojban aim at
> unambiguity probably attracts such people and heightens their chagrin when
> something that they've learned no longer means what they thought it meant,
> or has become incorrect due to language change.

But there is no obvious link between the language striving to be unambigous
and the fact that some things inside evolves. Now I have not your
experience on loglan or lojban, but I would be very surprised if the people
interrested enough in lojban to learn and use it (or even in any languages),
were so blue-eyed as to hold such a binary view of language learning
process: being wrong from time to time is actually a necessity in any
good learning, to relativise the world you're learning compared to the world
you owned, as shown long ago by pedagogic studies.

>
> Natural language evolution usually doesn't make things "wrong" so much as
> obsolete, and not necessarily even harder to understand. This makes
> natural language changes a little easier to take. Even so, in the English
> community, writers who decry novelties in usage as a decline in our
> education systems find a ready audience.

IMO the changes in question will never make lojban harder to understand,
but I agree that may be felt differently by individuals.

> They [(minor changes)] make even
> 10 year old texts in the language seem archaic (natural language doesn't
> evolve anywhere near that fast, except for teenage slang).
> ................
> If it happens by prescription (and most of the jboske discussion is
> inherently prescriptive), then it is NOT like a natlang. When the
language
> changes ONLY by someone initiating a novelty, usually without explaining
> it, and it propagates through the user community without ANYONE explicitly
> telling another that this is the way it "should" be done, then that is
> "living language". When Lojban reaches that stage, a baseline freeze will
> be harder to justify.
>

Sorry, but this is not true: there are numerous example of natlangs dramatic
prescriptive changes (and on scale that has nothing to do with a few cmavos
more or less, with a population size that has nothing to do with lojban
community present size, and regardless of an existing voluminous existing
corpus), that were consciously accepted by users on a short period.
The reasons are numerous, but strive to improve the tool, I mean the
language. Indeed there are voluminous linguistic studies done solely
on that aspect (for instance, there is a french multi-volume books by
Hagège and Fodor 'Voies et destin de l'action humaine sur les langues',
but I am not sure of an english version). BTW, this is a fascinating domain
of linguistic as it has very often political and social deep implications.

> >The first time I've been in Australia, even after tuning my ears to the
> >local english phonetic understanding :-), I still needed to ask my
> >australian friends what they meant, because of specific local english
> >usage. You may say that was because I am french, but my american
> >fellows, although most of them were too proud to admit it, were often
> >as lost as me!
>
> Do you think that they LIKE being lost? They are forced into that
> circumstance if they want to survive in Australia, but they aren't going
to
> seek out a language that consciously forces them to relearn stuff
regularly
> in order to maintain their understanding of what others are saying.

I think we disagree mainly on the importance of the changes and their
practical consequences: IMO in that case, just like in the lojban case,
there is nothing to relearn, at worst a few words and expressions specific
usage, but this is still the same language, and not so painful to grasp.
(as a matter of fact it could be, and in my experience it often is,
great fun and improve the understanding of your own usage)

> And even minor errors in reference manuals probably cause you to distrust
> the value of the entire manual.

Who could be naive enough to think that any book on any even moderatly
complex subject can be free of any errors? Even Knuth lost his bets with
his books and had to pay the error seekers :-)
(but that were very minor errors)

BTW, I am much more distressed by that lack of semantic clarity in
some of the book chapters, that by the fact that, say, my list of cmavo is
not complete or frozen , and this is often actually the main point of the
so-called 'fiddling'. I hasten to add that this is not meant as a
negative critic of Cowan's work, as this aspect is very difficult in lojban
and still very nebulous as shown by the numerous threads of the list.

>It is only by managing to label the jboske
> discussions "inconsequential" that many people will consider Lojban as
> being "done" and therefore worth spending the time to learn.

Indeed I agree on the term "inconsequential", because whatever is done with
this fiddling, approved or not, it will have no consequence on lojban
present status. IMO the CLL in a way make people consider lojban
as being "done", whatever the usage we make of the book.

-- Lionel