Subject: RE: [lojban] Re: Why we should cancel the vote or all vote NO (was RE: Official Statement- LLG Board approves new baseline policy

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 19:08:04 -0000

Nick:
> Heh. Rebellion. Cool. :-)
>
> Speaking ex cathedra as bypyfyky jatna :
>
> The reason I requested a mandate is that what we are proposing is way
> too important to be left to Board fiat. (In fact, I wanted membership
> approval; Bob then trumped me with seeking community approval.)
>
> If there is stuff in the proposal (and a lengthly and complex proposal
> it is) that people feel the need to object to, and a substantial number
> do, then we have not done our job right
>
> And that's OK. We then go back to the drawing board until we do. The
> point is not that the board have its way or demonstrate leadership or
> whatever. The point is that the board do what the membership approves
> of it doing
>
> I know why Bob is reluctant to redraft the document: it was painful to
> get to the point where any statement was draftable at all. (The major
> period of arguing, between me and xod, took a couple of weeks and got
> quite acrid, as you might expect.) But I'd rather we go through more
> birthing pains, than that we produce a plan unacceptable to the
> community
>
> I will not accept being yelled at for doing a cabal effort, as I said
> on the wiki. But I'm not going to avoid that by operating in a
> cabal-like fashion. If the community feels strongly that they cannot
> accept this document in toto without further discussion, then I do
> encourage them --- ex cathedra as Commission Chair --- to vote no.
> Because only when the statement matches what the community wants can I
> feel it safe to continue with my work
>
> That said, I happen to disagree with much of the specifics of what And
> proposed. Which shouldn't come as a surprise. But it is imperative that
> he be allowed to raise his views, and have them acknowledged. So let's
> start the discussion

Good. I'm pleased, and not surprised, that you take this view.

> Further responses
>
> Prescriptivism
>
> There is indeed a subtle shift going on in the position on
> prescriptivism. Bob has and continues to believe in untrammelled
> natural evolution; xod pretty much does as well. I believe (as Nick
> Nicholas, Lojbanist) that planned languages never evolve naturally, and
> (as board member) that many Lojbanists will want a body around to say
> whether their Lojban matches a 'standard'. These Lojbanists can profit
> from a body of language lawyers. The rest can ignore it. The BPFK can
> fill that role, although such a decision should be made at the time,
> not now; we are merely raising the possibility now. That's a status
> similar to English and prescriptivist, as Bob said; the prescriptivists
> will probably not have as much force as they do in the Esperanto
> Akademio (although even there, the Akademio frequently ends up having
> to catch up with changes wrought in other quarters.)
>
> The shift is that formerly, all calls for a Lojban Academy were
> repudiated. Now, it's being allowed that a Lojban Academy might be
> around for those who want one, as arbiters of 'standard' Lojban --- but
> not that it should have any binding force on the community. That is why
> the LLG is explicitly dissociating itself from any such body: it will
> not operate on LLG's behalf

Fair enough. My concern is that normative pressures might be exerted
by excluding the most idiosyncratic usage from, say, a corpus of
Lojban usage, or some official listing of texts in Lojban or suchlike.
I'm not just thinking of hypertinkerers, I'm thinking also of people
like Michael H, who I feel sometimes gets marginalized more than his
own eccentricity warrants. If the role of the Academy is not to be
exclusionary, but simply to rate texts by criteria articulated as
something more explicit than mere "baseline-compliance", then there's
no problem.

[...]
> And: Experimental cmavo
>
> If a sufficient number agree that a cmavo deserves to be official and
> documented, so it should be --- but the phonotactic distinctiveness of
> cmavo that have not yet attained that status has served us well, and I
> would fain it continue to. If we are running out of CVV space, we can
> still go to xVV. (I don't want to make that statement right now; I'd
> rather wait till we see how many exptal cmavo are looking like becoming
> official, first.) If we run out of THAT, then we can add a delimited
> area of CVVV.

I agree that we don't have to settle this in advance of BF work, so
long as your views on the issue are taken as a statement of where
you're coming from, rather than as a constitution that we must agree
to if we agree to participate in the BF. I'm not at all accusing you
of taking that "take or leave it" stance. We can agree that we have
the shared aim of achieving, as soon as possible, a consensus on cmavo
definitions that will be lasting. My concern about limiting and
guillotining debate is that the decision that arises is less likely
to be lasting (-- the decision will be more robust if it is arrived
at with all pros and cons having been taken into consideration). My
concern about excessive resistance to officializing new cmavo is that
officializing new cmavo is the best way of short-circuiting debate
about definitions of existing cmavo.

As for the shape of new cmavo, CVVV have the advantage that they allow
for phonological patterning with existing cmavo. For example, suppose
that definitions M1 and M2 are competing for {ta'e}. If M1 can be
assigned to {ta'e} and M2 to {tai'e}, then the result is prettier
and more learnable, and M1 does not look so privileged compared to
M2 than would be the case if M2 were assigned to something wholly
unrelated like {xa'o}.

To me, a CVVV shape says not "experimental" but "created after the
publication of CLL". The concept of "experimental cmavo" will no
longer exist once the prescriptive phase ends, so there seems no
desirability to building +experimental into the language as a
morphological feature.

> I am not envisioning mass addition of new cmavo, though,
> and sanctioning going into CVVV implies that we will, I do not wish to
> be bound by that now. But if we decide to disambiguate through two
> cmavo, then it would be my understanding that both cmavo should be
> official

Good. Time will tell how often the addition of new cmavo is called
for.

> Whether future cmavo or not should be added is a matter for the
> post-baseline board. I don't like the implications of "we shall
> prescribe into being new cmavo", but I don't see why that determination
> needs to be made now

For cmavo whose meaning is currently completely unclear, we are in
effect proposing to prescribe them into being.

> And: Zipf
>
> And, I hate to relay fundamentalist hatemail, but I have to. I have no
> confidence in a priori determinations of Zipf necessity, nor that we
> have enough usage yet to make such determinations even a posteriori. I
> will not consider frequency of usage as the only valid factor for
> introducing a new cmavo. I am not as confident as you about the 'saving
> syllables' imperative. I believe the fundamentalist imperative will
> trump the zipfean imperative (noone in Esperanto ever says "de l'" --
> even though it is in fact officially sanctioned.) And I doubt you'll
> get many takers for No Change Without Consensus. So I stand my ground
> on this

I have no confidence in a priori determinations of Zipf necessity
either. I feel that there needs to be a mechanism for a posteriori
determinations of Zipf necessity. At the moment, I'm alone in thinking
this, but I would like to keep the door open for future generations
of more competent Lojbanists who I believe might come to feel as I
do.

To be concrete, I would make the following proposals, which I realize
would not currently have majority support.
(1) All monosyllabic cmavo whose usage to date falls below a fairly high
threshold should be replaced by a phonologically similar disyllabic
cmavo. These freed up monosyllabic cmavo, along with all other unassigned
monosyllabic should not be assigned. After enough text has been written
after this point -- a million words of good-quality writing, say -- the
corpus should be examined and monosyllabic cmavo assigned to the highest
frequency forms. (In hindsight, I think no monosyllabic cmavo should
have been assigned before a million words of quality usage, but it's
too late now for this.)
(2) As described on the wiki at "Exploiting the preparser". The idea is
that once there is enough text to generate high quality statistics,
new cmavo could be introduced that rewrite as high-frequency cmavo
sequences. If this were to happen, it would be many years hence, and
I simply think we should not at this stage constitutionally prohibit
it from ever occurring.

> And: Baseline
>
> I assume what you mean is, the baseline encompasses semantics as well
> as syntax. I whole-hearted agree, but I do not understand what the
> statement should concretely say to assert this, and I would have
> thought it was obvious anyway

It's not as easy as this. It's easy to determine whether a text contains
ungrammatical sentences, but much harder to determine whether intended-
meaning matches baseline-meaning, since the gricean principles that
natural language exploits can allow such great mismatches between
baseline-meaning and communicated-meaning.

> And: Unintelligible cmavo
>
> We will go with the supplicatory model before we decide we don't know
> what a cmavo is. The current statement of the baseline does not allow
> cmavo deletion, because all cmavo are documented in CLL, one way or
> another. To erase cmavo would be a major techfix, and I am opposed to
> such ventures on principle

In my experience, the supplicatory model doesn't really work, because
-- to put it hyperbolically -- we end up with Lojbab's half-baked
understanding or recollection of what something meant 20 years ago
in Loglan or what a gang of now-invisible and uninterrogable
Lojbanists came up with 15 years ago.

I agree that deleting these cmavo is quite a radical step, but it is
also a refreshingly honest one.

> At the very most, if noone has ever ever ever used lau, I might accept
> turning lau into say xu'e, and releasing lau. But for a one syllable
> cmavo to be necessary for something Zipfeanly, it has to be something
> so urgent and obvious, I'd have thought the heavens would be clamoring
> for it by now. In my book, xa'o and mu'ei are the only ones even close
> to this (with mu'ei endangered by sumtcita ka'e); and they're not that
> close

You will see from what I say above that I favour deassigning monosyllabics
that are not heavily used, and reassigning them only after a LOT of
skilled usage.

As for disyllabics that currently clamour for monosyllabics, I personally
crave them for {du'u} above all, and also {lo'e}, {le'e} and perhaps
{ke'a} and {ce'u}. Certainly I find myself using {lo'edu'u} constantly
and find it extremely irritating -- infuriating, even (given that the
language design could have reduced it to two, one or even zero syllables).
But I don't really think that the assignment of monosyllabics should be
decided by personal opinion. (Or rather, I really think that it shouldn't
be decided by personal opinion.)

Regarding the existing experimental cmavo, I suppose we could have a
poll about which, if any, we would like to make official. But I
would prefer to get rid of the notion of officialness and instead
simply say that the mini-dictionary fixes the meaning of the cmavo it
lists. A proper syntactic parser should not have the mahoste built
in to it, but should instead take input from a community-maintained
mahoste that can be updated with cmavo not listed in the mini-dictionary.

--And.