Subject: Comments on the New Policy

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2002 00:42:22 -0000

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.