From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Fri Nov 29 16:40:21 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_3_0); 30 Nov 2002 00:40:21 -0000 Received: (qmail 27776 invoked from network); 30 Nov 2002 00:40:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m13.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 30 Nov 2002 00:40:21 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lmsmtp04.st1.spray.net) (212.78.202.114) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 30 Nov 2002 00:40:20 -0000 Received: from oemcomputer (host213-121-67-144.surfport24.v21.co.uk [213.121.67.144]) by lmsmtp04.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3557B47E88 for ; Sat, 30 Nov 2002 01:40:18 +0100 (MET) To: "Lojban@Yahoogroups. Com" Subject: Comments on the New Policy Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 00:42:22 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Importance: Normal From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=122260811 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin I support the great majority of Nick's views and the new policy document. Below are the points where I disagree to a lesser or greater extent. A. Experimental cmavo 1. The shape of a cmavo should not determine whether it is officially documented. If a sufficient number of people agree that there should be a cmavo with meaning M, and if there are no available CVV cmavo for M, then N should be assigned to a CVVV cmavo and documented. 2. Many debates about the meaning of a cmavo, C1, come down to whether the cmavo should have meaning M1 or M2, where both M1 and M2 are legitmate, reasonable, desirable, etc. The easiest way to settle these debates is to pick one meaning (M1) for C1 and assign the other meaning (M2) to a spare cmavo, C2 (which of necessity must be a CVVV) cmavo. If the current notion that CVV cmavo are official and CVVV are unofficial continues, then the debate will not be solved so easily, since any text using C2 will fail to parse, and many Lojbanists will dismiss it as nonstandard or experimental Lojban. The solution is to make both C1 and C2 official and documented. 3. The baseline should accept that future study and usage of Lojban will reveal the need not only for additional fu'ivla but also for additional cmavo (and perhaps even additional gismu and rafsi, as witness the problematic absence of a gismu for "intend"). The baseline should assign existing cmavo a clear definite meaning, but should not be taken as permanently defining what is and isn't a standard official cmavo. 4. If the only objection to the above is that it should be possible to tell from a cmavo's shape whether it is experimental or official, then a portion of CVVV cmavo space should be defined as official (but not necessarily used) and the rest as experimental, just as is currently done with CVV space. B. Zipfeanism & Lojban's serving its speakers 1. The design of Lojban is such that, quite unnecessarily, it is difficult to be both concise and logically precise. John has often said "The price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity", but this does not apply to logical precision, since it is finite. It would have been quite possible to design Lojban so that it was more concise, but concision was never a design goal. However, most Lojban users care a great deal about concision and it is a major factor influencing their usage. "Saving syllables" is important to most Lojbanists. At the moment there are very few Lojbanists who care about Lojban being precise, but I predict that as more Lojbanists become comfortable with elementary logic, more Lojbanists will yearn for a Lojban that is both precise and concise. 2. It is natural in language that high frequency words and phrases get shortened. Low frequency words can be short, but high frequency words tend not to be long (even if they look long in writing, they are likely to get shortened in speech). Lojban acknowledges this; it is the rationale for the rafsi system, and for the notion that there should be a rough correlation between a lujvo's length and its frequency. But Lojban has no way to shorten high frequency cmavo or cmavo sequences. 3. Furthermore, the short, monosyllabic cmavo forms were assigned without any substantial sustained usage that would indicate which cmavo meanings were the most frequent and therefore the most deserving of monosyllabic forms. (E.g. a good strategy would have been to make all cmavo disyllabic at this stage, and then assign the monosyllabic forms to the most frequent meanings once a substantial body of fluent usage has accumulated.) 4. I therefore predict that as more people are both jboka'e (caring about usage) and jboskepre (caring about precision), the antizipfeanism and longwindedness of Lojban will be felt more and more acutely. The more competent a Lojbanist is, the more acutely the problem will be felt. 5. If Lojban is to serve the needs of its speakers (above all, the needs of those who actually use it and know it thoroughly), it must be willing to change in a planned, organized, designed way. **Instead of committing itself to a baseline freeze (i.e. a policy of No Change), the LLG should have the policy of No Change Without Consensus.** Baseline compliance I have stated my views on the wiki (On the baseline conformance imperative). To summarize briefly, I think the key imperative is that any grammatical sentence that one uses in Lojban should intend to communicate the meaning that the baseline assigns to it. Failing to do so undermines the baseline, and it is important that there be a baseline (even though I am opposed to a constitutionally frozen baseline). But writing text that contains ungrammatical utterances that can only be understood on the basis of knowledge of Lojban does not undermine the baseline. It is legitmate to describe such a text as not baseline-compliant, but the social pressure to conform to the baseline should be a pressure to match intended-meaning to baseline- meaning, not to avoid producing ungrammatical text. It may be thought that the Policy's statement that "everyone is free to do as they like" covers this, but if, say, an official corpus of Lojban text is compiled it will be important to distinguish "contains nothing but grammatical sentences" from "contains no grammatical sentence that does not intend to express the meaning that the baseline ascribes to it". Probably the best solution is just to clearly distinguish these two notions, and then leave it up to individuals to judge which they choose to disapprove of. Unintelligible cmavo Quite often we have no idea what certain cmavo mean. There are no obvious candidate meanings. In such cases, we should be willing to abolish the cmavo. I don't feel very strongly about this point, but (a) it would save a hell of a lot of debate, and (b) it is galling that we lack useful cmavo because nobody thought of them before the mahoste was finalized, yet are lumbered with useless cmavo because somebody once thought they they were a good idea but failed to document the idea intelligibly. --And.