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

From: Jay F Kominek <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 11:20:31 -0600

On Sat, Oct 05, 2002 at 12:10:53PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> And Rosta scripsit:
> 
> > > Lojban may eventually start to evolve in the way natlangs do, but that 
> > > can only occur in a genuine way when there is a large body of 
> > > quasi-native speakers, and this cannot happen if people start tinkering 
> > > with the language. 
> > 
> > Are there any current examples of actual tinkerings that present
> > an actual impediment to the emergence of a large body of quasi-
> > native speakers?
> 
> It is the fact of tinkering, rather than any specific example thereof,
> that constitutes a disincentive to learning; without learning, there
> can be no such large body of speakers. People do not want to learn
> things that will become massively obsolete soon.

"The semantics of existing documents should not be violated.

Otherwise why should anyone want to write anything? It might be
declared nonsensical tomorrow, or even yesterday in the message you
missed because your mail server was dropping email."

A constant state of change is *unacceptable* if the number of users of
the language is to increase. There is no reason or need for people to
run around changing Lojban. People who want to change things, rather
than work out problems with ill-defined portions of Lojban, should go
play with Lojban2 or Andban or something, using Lojban as a base, but
not calling it 'Lojban'. The name is of no consequence to those parties,
but 'brand recognition' is key to growing the speaker base.

> > Technically, the BNF 'grammar' is more like a grammaticality-checker
> > than a true grammar. That is, it will tell you whether or not a
> > string is well-formed Lojban, but it won't tell you what it means.
> 
> Well, this is an equivoque on "grammar". Computer types use the word
> "grammar" in precisely this sense.

Computer science as a whole uses "grammar" in that sense. To the best
of my knowledge, even computer scientists working on language
processing software use "grammar" that way, as there isn't any other
word for the CS meaning.

In CS, a grammar is all about deciding whether or not a string belongs
to the set of strings (the "language") defined by the grammar.
(Preferably in polynomial time.)

-- 
Jay Kominek <[email-masked]>
Were they dressed like this?