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: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 18:19:26 -0500

At 07:08 PM 12/1/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>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.

We agree.

>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.

There are some areas of the language (like Mex) that simply haven't seen 
enough usage at all to get useful statistics. If one argues that therefore 
nothing in Mex should ever be monosyllabic, then one is arguing that there 
should not be a Mex, since there is in fact no usage that demands a Mex at all.

>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.

The bottom line is that if there is any significant possibility of this 
happening in the future, then large numbers of people will refuse to learn 
Lojban, and we will never GET the usage needed to make Zipfean 
decisions. You have NO idea how painful the revisions to TLI Loglan were, 
over the years, to the TLI community. EVERY change, no matter how minor, 
lost people, and the major changes lost lots of people even when it made 
the language much better. Even today, 15 years after we last used TLI 
Loglan in any significant way, Nora more than I (but both of us) still 
occasionally pull up a TLI gismu rather than a Lojban gismu for a 
concept. Every change you guys make to the CLL baseline with your jboske 
debates (and I won't pretend any longer that your debates haven't 
effectively changed the baseline, which is one reason why the new policy) 
makes it that much more likely that I never will speak Lojban as much as I 
did in 1997. If the byfy result is planned to be modified, by any criteria 
set down like planned Zipfean adjustments, then I won't bother to learn the 
language. And if I won't, I'm sure a lot of others won't.

> > 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.

I deny that the (existing) baseline encompasses semantics because the 
semantics has not been defined. The new baseline, to the extent that the 
cmavo are finally defined rather than merely listed and keyworded, MAY 
encompass whatever semantics is included in those definitions. We won't 
know if it will be easy or hard to determine matches between intended and 
baseline semantics until we have documented baseline semantics.

> > 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.

Possibly. In which case the byfy should feel free to reject it. In many 
cases we have evidence and not merely my half-baked 
recollections. Including a TLI rep in the byfy discussion may also provide 
an independent source for "what Lojbab remembers trying to do" because in 
most cases, TLI is still doing it.

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

It is not a practical one, unless you know someone who wants to buy several 
hundred copies of CLL that would suddenly be worthless. We made a serious 
commitment to NOT changing the language, and backed it with a $17,000 
investment which has not yet been repaid. And while it might be honest, 
there also might be hundreds of potential Lojbanists that would go 
elsewhere, for fear that in another 5 years we might be "honest" again and 
throw out a bunch of stuff that they've spent time learning.

> > 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.

The whole area of alphabets and lerfu is tied up with Mex. We cannot say 
how useful Mex will be, but it certainly will not be useful if we make it 
more difficult to use.

>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}.

I don't crave ANY change to any cmavo that I already know and use. I want 
the bloody language to stop changing long enough for me and others to 
really learn it and BECOME skilled speakers.

>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).

Whereas "la'edi'u" was a common phrase from the earliest versions of 
Lojban, and no one ever suggested that it deserved a shorter form. Nor do 
I want one now.

>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

That rejects the idea of a baseline.

>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.

Then write one.

Meanwhile, in how many natural languages are the set of structure words 
really an open set?

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