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

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 10:32:46 +0200

Robin Turner:
[prescriptive changes in natlangs]
>Very true, but your point about numbers invalidates what you are saying.
>To use the example I'm most familiar with, Turkish went through a
>period of rapid and largely planned change in the early years of the
>Republic; the aim was to standardise grammar, replace Arabic and Persian
>loan-words with "pure" Turkish equivalents and adopt Turkified European
>scientific terms where no Turkish equivlent existed. It was largely
>successful due to the fact that in many cases they were simply replacing
>the Ottoman court language with something that would bemore
>comprehensible to the Turk in the street, partly because they had a
>dirigiste state, and partly becuae they had a user base of tens of
>millions to play around with. The same does not apply to conlangs with
>a user base of a few thousand (if that). A Turkish citizen has to speak
>Turkish, and if he/she wants to do official business, then that means
>using whatever kind of Turkish the Türk Dil Kurumu deem appropriate. --

I agree that the Turkish example is not relevant to Lojban, but it shows
that the number of existing speakers or the volume of the existing corpus
are not strong arguments against precriptive evolution, as it has been said
before. (In the very case of Turkish I would add that the problem was
also awfully complicated by the fact that the 'dil devrimi' was only one
point of a general politic of secularisation of the society).
Something like Breton may be more relevant: the speakers were rather
few, they could, theorically at least, also drop Breton and speak French.
The reforms of the language in the last century touched many aspects,
grammatical, lexical, graphical.... and the decrease of the number of
speakers was not linked to that. While grossly simplifying, you could
say the same of Irish, Gaelic, and with some more speakers, of Catalan,
Finnish or Hungarian just to name a few.
But all these cases are not really comparable, as the problems involved are
often too complex and/or specific to draw general rules. My purpose was
just to illustrate that a dinstinction between natlang and conlang cannot be
based on the prescription possibilies or changes.

Robert LeChevalier:
>>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".

Ok, it depends of what you mean by 'correct'. It sounds funny to me
nonetheless, like a sign of very twisted ego, to be more sensitive of the
grammatical correctness perennity of one's writing or saying, than to the
intented meaning.

>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.

I agree. That would be very useful.

>Finally and most importantly for one key Lojbanic purpose, linguists
>respect such usage-based norms and evolution and do not much respect
>prescriptivism. So long as prescribers have significant clout over the
>language, we will have trouble gaining respect as a language (and
>community) worthy of serious linguistic investigation.

I agree, precription is too strong a word in the case of jboske though,
proposal sounds better to me. I am well aware that eventually only
usage decides on the validity of any prescription, including the ones of
CLL. I think you sur-estimate the power of the tinkerers: note that at
least the large numbers of Lojbanists who do not read the lists that
you referred to, are immune to such disease :-)
The point was that you seem afraid that the tinkering of some would
prevent newcomers, and yet you speak of an already existing
community of users large enough to make the language evolve
by usage (oh, sorry, that was Invent Yourself's argument).
IMO, in Lojban actual status and usage, tinkering is quite harmless,
and as was said earlier "inconsequential".

Invent Yourself:
>There are students who are using the language at a low level, and there
>are people who have publically stated their refusal to learn the language
>towards fluency. They decide themselves, not me!

Ok, but what is the link between that decision and the relevance of
their proposals? Besides, this is highly subjective topic: I remenber
And writing he was more interested with ingeneering than fluency
and yet his recent postings in Lojban show nice lojban usage.
And that IMO changes nothing to the validity, value or interest of his
others postings centered on 'tinkering'. 'Tinkering' alone could
indeed be a method, admitedly a convoluted but fun one, of language
learning :-)

>But the more contributions come from outside the using body,
>the more it is engineered, and the less it is evolving "naturally". Of
>course, when a language is barely in existence, and nobody yet uses it,
>only one of those options is possible.

There is no such thing like "natural" evolution in linguistic. Even the
definition or the pace of what you call "natural" drift is very variable,
from a couple years (in some pidgin creoles) to centuries to become
visible to users.
In a sense, everything is "natural" and any user has a "prescription power"
on its language, consciously or not. The fame and destiny of his
"prescriptive decisions", wether through usage or engeneering, depend
on so many webbed factors that they cannot be foreseen.

-- Lionel