Subject: Re: [lojban] prescription & description (was: RE: Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Oct 2002 15:44:53 -0400

At 02:51 PM 10/5/02 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>The crucial case is Lojban analogues of statements of the form
>"X is (not) Standard English", which to people who do not ordinarily
>speak Std E may feel like prescriptions. It is statements like this
>that Lojbab calls 'prescription'.

Lojban "prescription" to me is any statement about how the language works 
or should work that is not based on specific experience that it HAS worked 
that way (when used by competent users of the language). I would 
distinguish this from "speculation" ("what would/might it mean if X were 
said in Y context", or the more common "how would/might I say Z" (for 
non-Lojban expression Z).

The primary place where people run into the prescriptive/descriptive 
dichotomy is in a dictionary.

A prescriptive dictionary would define the words in accordance with the 
language design, and not care whether the language has actually been used 
that way. A descriptive dictionary would avoid including any word without 
an actual usage cite, and the definition is interpolated from that actual 
usage. (In the case of lujvo, this would mean that most lujvo would have 
only 1 or 2 place; jvajvo are inherently prescriptive.)

A descriptive dictionary would include definitions that covered actual 
usage even if they don't match the prescription. xruti would therefore be 
polysemous, having xorxes's place structure as well as the standard 
one. Fully descriptive would merely say which was used more, not that one 
was considered "standard". A prescriptive dictionary of Lojban would never 
show polysemy, because Lojban words are not supposed to display same.

Since the Lojban design avoided prescribing semantics; I am not much 
bothered by semantics discussions, except when they might actually 
contradict some wording used in the baseline documents (including CLL). By 
policy I can rule all such semantics pronouncements as "speculations", as 
defined above.

>Such statements are usually
>descriptive yet are not usually based directly on usage. In practise,
>descriptive statements about a language are hardly ever based on usage.

I don't think that is true for dictionaries.

>But it's here that the applicability to Lojban breaks down. For
>one thing, Lojban does not have a body of accomplished speakers;
>we are all learners of a foreign language.

Which is precisely why we are not ready to move from prescription to 
description. There is not yet enough usage to "let usage decide" most 
questions.

>For another thing,
>the question of which dialect of Lojban is 'Standard Lojban' is
>not settled,

Any dialect that strictly matches the baseline documents is "standard" 
regardless of its semantics properties OTHER THAN what is defined in the 
baseline documents.

>And I sometimes say "You should use sentences whose meaning is
>the same as the meaning you intend to communicate". But none of
>these sorts of statement dominate the discussions that Lojbab
>calls 'prescriptive'.

I don't know that I've called any discussion "prescriptive". Discussion 
isn't by nature prescriptive.

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