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

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2002 19:34:59 -0400

At 09:11 PM 10/3/02 +0200, Lionel Vidal wrote:
>Robert LeChevalier:
> > While the Board is debating the question right now, my (abbreviated)
> > opinion is that the grammar, as defined in CLL has long been considered
> > complete.
>
>You said earlier that most lojbanist tend to be perfectionists who do not
>like to ever be incorrect. IMO the grammar is not complete enough
>to allow that yet.

The grammar is complete. The semantics is still debated. By "not 
incorrect" they mean that they do not violate any rules. In areas where 
there are no rules (semantics) they cannot be incorrect.

>As many discussions and recognised bad or incorrect
>usages show, semantic ambiguity, especially in the chapter on logic,
>but also in some other area (quantifiers, tense...) still prevents a truly
>non ambiguous usage: what you say today is likely to remain
>grammatically correct tomorrow, but the intended meaning may
>become quite incorrect when some issues are solved.

But it remains grammatically correct. It may not successfully communicate 
(because of the semantics issue) but it isn't "wrong".

> > I understand that Esperanto has multiple ideologies on certain aspects of
>the
> > language, but that while they are apparently significant for the people
>who
> > argue them enough that they bother to do so, the different ideologies are
> > largely "inconsequential" to the learner.
>
>Indeed. That was the very point I tried to express in my previous post.
>Jboske tinkering or specific usage has no negative impact on new
>learners. On the contrary this tinkering may help him to better understand
>some difficult points of the language, even (or mainly) while disagreeing
>with the proposed changes.

Only if he understands the jboske writings, which is what xod and I were 
criticizing (that it) seldom happens.

>And for those not interested in tinkering, it's simple enough to ignore
>the thread.

Not so simple. Different people read the list in different ways. Some get 
the list in digest form; this keeps from flooding their in-basket with a 
raft of messages so that they can't find the non-Lojban ones; it also means 
that they can't sort by thread. And people are intimidated by the immense 
volume of hypertechnical stuff, so they don't ask their simple questions 
(or sometimes their simple questions actually start a hypertechnical 
discussion that they don't have the time or interest to follow. Sometimes 
people want a one paragraph answer (e.g. a "how to say it" question), even 
if the answer is that "we aren't sure and need to go off an have a 
technical logic discussion to make sure we are answering correctly", in 
which case an eventual followup answering the original question needs to be 
posted.

I'm not unhappy that the technical discussions take place. But they would 
be more meaningful if as xod said, someone summarized any conclusions for 
us non-logicians, and if the sheer volume did not drive people away from 
trying to read the list.

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