Subject: RE: [lojban] Loglan

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 20:47:47 -0500

At 11:28 PM 12/1/02 +0000, And wrote:
>Lojbab:
> > From what I have gathered based on McIvor's comments to me, JCB would
> > oppose any sort of baseline. JCB would have agreed with And that the
> > language should just keep changing as people come up with new ideas. It
> > was the community that wanted a version of the language that (would be
> > official and) would stop changing. Hence the baseline policy that I came
> > up with in response to the couple dozen Loglanists who wrote to me write
> > after I started trying to get the Loglan community back together (which 
> led
> > to Lojban)
>
>In the light of recent terminological clarifications, I gather that JCB
>and I would favour a baseline, but oppose a baseline freeze. The Naturalists,
>on the other hand, might oppose a baseline tout court, or at least see it
>as an irrelevance.

No. JCB was a perpetual prescriptivist with an evolving AND informal 
prescription. His Academy had no limits on what it could change, when it 
could change it, or on the scope of the changes (in theory, his Academy 
could have adopted the Lojban design in toto as a language change), but he 
personally had a veto on any Academy change. A baseline procedure means 
that the changes are controlled and documented, and that the documents are 
maintained to reflect the baseline so that all users have a single 
reference point from which to base their usage at a given time. Because of 
"trade secrecy" and earlier general sloppiness, there was never a single 
language definition in play throughout the community, and indeed arguably 
never a single language definition at all. (At the time I started working 
with JCB on updating the Loglan dictionary in 1986, I found no less than 4 
mutually contradictory "standard" gismu lists in use BY JCB - contradictory 
as to what words were on it, sometimes how they were spelled, how many 
places they had etc. The first issue of JL reports on my attempts to 
resolve this - JCB rejected any such effort.) People would submit Loglan 
writings to pc for inclusion in The Loglanist, written in dialects anywhere 
up to 3 years old, and they would be printed, sometimes with comment 
indicating something new, which is how many of the changes were 
promulgated. Other changes were proposed, discussed seriously in the 
publications, but never adopted (and no reason given) so that you could not 
assume that seeing it in TL meant that it was part of the language (or that 
it was NOT part of the language).

I understand that things got better, I suspect in part because of our 
example. But I'm not sure whether, before JCB's death, anyone but McIvor 
and perhaps JCB had a current definition of the current language and KNEW 
it was current including all decisions of the Academy (and it was never 
"complete" by my non-semantic standard, much less yours which demand some 
semantics clarification). In any event L1, and L3, the two major language 
documents on their website, do not agree with each other and the current 
language. A baseline change, post CLL publication (our equivalent to L1) 
would require change pages for CLL.

So no, I don't think that JCB even understood a baseline, much less favored 
one.

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