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: "Logical Language Group, Inc." <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 03:53:03 -0500

At 05:53 AM 12/3/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > lau will never exist as a standalone word - it will always be paired with
> > another word (maybe more - I can't remember the grammar off the top of my
> > head). Thus any lau construct is ALREADY polysyllabic, with the lau
> > serving as a common beginning to give a grammatical cue as to what is going
> > on
>
>If we were to decide to do some rejigging for the sake of a bit more
>concision, I expect some of our clever colleages could work out suitable
>statistical algorithms to calculate where the greatest savings could be
>made.

All this sounds basically like what I did back in 1994 with the rafsi 
assignments - tried to rejigger them to reflect actual usage in Lojban 
compounds as opposed to the wild guesses based on TLI Loglan compounds that 
I started with.

I did a lot of data gathering, did the statistical analysis, and when I got 
done made a proposal. The community, in spite of the fact that the rafsi 
were not yet baselined, got royally pissed at me. They went through the 
list with a fine tooth comb, we voted on each and every change that people 
found the least bit doubtful, and the community made it quite clear to me 
that I damn well better not try anything like that again, baseline or no 
baseline.

I am reasonably sure that Nick remembers this because he was one of the 
louder community in putting me and my statistical analysis in its place. 
%^) It may be one reason why he is acceptably (to me) conservative on 
baseline issues after at one time being one of the more radical innovators.

> > My personal feelings in all this, given the desire for monosyllables, is
> > that the byfy should probably reabsorb the xVVs, and consider using the 4
> > monosyllables for high frequency combinations that have unexpectedly
> > emerged. But I would not reassign any words: ce'u which would otherwise be
> > a good candidate, should remain ce'u because otherwise several years of
> > Lojban text, and prior learning, is invalidated
>
>If, hypothetically, we gave ce'u a monosyllabic, we could still leave
>the form {ce'u} assigned to it too.

I don't think we should. But precedent is that ce'u would remain 
unassigned. ci'a has never been reused because it was deleted and still 
had clear associations in many people's minds, even though it, like lau, 
never actually saw a lot of usage before that point.

> > But I don't feel strongly on this, and indeed have a good argument against
> > it. For all that it takes 4 syllables, I have found that, in speech at
> > least, "la'edi'u" works very well for aural parsing, just as "lenu" and
> > "lesedu'u" and "sekaileka". These make the language easier to listen to
> > and understand without conscious parsing (you hear "sekaileka" and think
> > "property", not "sumti-tcita with an abstraction". If all the key
> > constructs are monosyllables, then that means that they lack contrast, and
> > you have "noisy environment" errors where people hear "xau" as "kau" or
> > "gau". We've already found that the se/te/ve/xe series is troublesome in
> > oral communication, and we changed the rafsi so that at least in lujvo
> > there is contrast (this is one reason for using the se/te/ve/xe lujvo
> > rather than separate words, is that it adds that oral contrast)
>
>I take your point. If "sekaileka" were English, we'd end up pronouncing
>it "skalka", nice and short,

I don't. It rolls off my tongue in a singsong manner.

English is a language that especially in Britain is prone to cutting the 
number of syllables, perhaps because it is stress-timed in rhythm. Lojban 
seems to me more akin to languages that have many short syllables which are 
syllable-timed (though I probably stress-time my speech from habit, I'd 
like to try to learn to speak Lojban more like Bharati speak English. You 
hear all the sounds in such an accent and it sounds cool. Cutting the 
number of syllables to me seems not a great advantage, since it risks even 
greater sound collision, and in this case hides grammatical structure (I 
once argued for a single word meaning "lenu", but then we lose the 
grammatical structure of nu...kei, which is what JCB did in his version as 
well until we pointed it out (McIvor says they fixed it, but I am skeptical 
that they could have done so).

> > It is hard to argue these things in a community that thus far is mostly
> > text-oriented, and in which some subjects are not discussed to the degree
> > that they might be under fluent use. In the case of Mex, that entire
> > sublanguage is a linguistic experiment: can we come up with a speakable
> > form of unambiguous Mex corresponding to the written mathematical
> > notation. If you design it to be unspeakable, it most certainly will never
> > be spoken. If you design it to be speakable, it might be used, and in fact
> > if used could provide a new application for Lojban that expands our
> > potential community and applicability. (Lojban: The International Language
> > of Mathematics ??? %^)
>
>I had suggested waiting for at least a million words of text before
>making firm judgements about frequency. Anyway, I take your point about
>what is desirable to Lojban qua experiment. As you know, I tend to
>think of Lojban not as an experiment but as an attempt to improve
>upon natural language in at least some respects, so I tend to be a bit
>disatisfied with those respects in which Lojban is inferior to natlangs.

Lojban is a lot of things to a lot of people. I juggled a lot of 
conflicting priorities when making the original design decisions. I have 
some regrets, but never enough to go back and redo it.

> > I think that if you look back in history, my job has been "naysaying" for a
> > lot more years than just one or two. More like a dozen. This is not
> > necessarily my preference, but rather what I see as my obligation. Trying
> > too many new initiatives and failing at them makes us look like
> > failures. Waiting till the right moment has led to good results. I was
> > non-supportive of the wiki when it started. It started anyway and did
> > well, and I am as strong a backer of the thing as anyone for the purpose
> > that it serves. The byfy was an impossibility 5 years ago; now it is a
> > necessity. The job of dictionary writing did not change, but the community
> > changed and matured and that is now the right way to produce a dictionary
> > rather than Lojbab going off into a corner for a year. Believe me, I like
> > the responsibility off my back
>
>As I recall, you were the main instigator of Ckafybarja.

Actually, that was proposed by the attendees at a quasi-LogFest gathering, 
when we tried to hold one separate from the annual meeting one October.

>As well as the
>main instigator of Lojban.

Which was the idea of one of my students.

> So you have led new initiatives in your time...

If I made a list of *my* innovations, you would perhaps be surprised. But 
many of them also were suggested by others and elaborated by me.

> > > > I question that in natural languages it is meaningful to say "bad for
> > > > semantic reasons". Natural languages as well as artificial 
> languages are
> > > > humpty-dumpty: words mean what we want them to mean, and if 
> communication
> > > > occurs then the semantics is "correct"
> > >
> > >If a foreign learner says "I am knowing the answer", what is the nature
> > >of the error? It is grammatical,
> >
> > End of point. Find an example that is NOT a grammatical error. When I
> > refer to grammar, I distinguish it from semantics
>
>I was unclear. It is not a 'grammatical error' = 'error of grammar'.
>The sentence is grammatical.

It is?

I guess we have different ideas of English grammar.

> > It doesn't have a large constituency, but TLI not having one, just as it
> > not having a proper tense grammar, kept on cropping up and biting. ("Four
> > score and seven years ago ..."
>
>Use brivla: x1 is a set/sequence of cardinality x2, x1 is product of
>x2 and x3, x1 is sum of x2 and x3. No absolute need for special mex.

Try reading a mathematical notation in English. You don't use the lexicon 
(predicates) but read the notation. Even a simple mathematical formula is 
too long in lexical elements (which usually would be several syllables 
anyway). The quadratic formula in Mex may be too long, in lexicon it would 
be unintelligible. In English we split the difference
negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4 ac over 2 a
Using brivla I get something like
the quantity the quantity -b added to or subtracting the quantity the 
square root of the quantity the quantity the square of b subtracting the 
quantity the product of 4,a,c ... (sufficient terminators) and all of this 
divided by the quantity the product of 2,a

> > Certainly. But what were the reasons for creating Loglan/Lojban in the
> > first place? If the fluent Lojbanist find that Mark I does not in fact
> > result in a "logical language" but does come closer to that goal, they more
> > than we will be able to spec out what Mark II needs to be, and given the
> > nature of the community, someone undoubtedly will go build it. The
> > existence of Loglan and Lojban has not stopped guaspi and Ceqli from being
> > written, and no doubt if you ever work on Livagian (sp?) again, you will do
> > so informed by what you've learned from Lojban. Why presume that native
> > Lojban speakers won't have Tolkien's "Secret Vice" as well?
>
>The one and only thing that makes Lojban superior to other engineered
>languages is the one and only thing that makes Esperanto superior to
>other IALs: the community (not just of outright users, but also of
>participants, collaborators, etc.). Even at this stage, but with the
>benefit of lessons learnt from Lojban, several of us could redesign
>Lojban and come up with something vastly better.

I'm not sure.

> > Way too premature. No one will know what Mark II would need to be like
> > until the generation that learns Lojban AFTER the baseline ends tackles the
> > problem. At that point YOU'LL be the old fogey standing in the way of
> > progress. If people want to make notes for things they would do in a
> > Lojban Mark II on the wiki *IN LOJBAN*, I am sure that the generation in
> > question will find your ideas interesting, if quaint. %^)
>
>I think you underestimate how much we already know, or at least how much
>some of us think we already know.

I think that people know more than they actually know, because I know how 
much people thought they knew back when it turned out that they didn't know 
as much as they thought.

%^)

Can we try that again in Lojban???

> I think I have a pretty clear idea of
>what a design should be like, but very little idea about frequencies
>-- how often people talk about a this, how often they talk about a that,
>and so forth.

Which is one of those things that we don't know about. The Lojban 
community, however excellent, is rather skewed at present towards linguists 
and computer programmers, with an unusually high percentage of libertarian 
political thought. It hasn't always been so limited, and it probably won't 
always be.

> > And yes I am talking as President of LLG. I am defending what I see as a
> > design principle. I so seldom stop to think about what >I< want for the
> > language that I doubt that I could easily figure it out. I'm almost always
> > representing a constituency, not myself
>
>Fair enough. I respect that. And I accept that when there is a conflict
>between the original principles and the current wishes of sizable segments
>of the community, you're between a rock and a hard place.

And I always prefer to resolve it by assuming that the potential community 
is FAR larger than the current community, and hence their interests have a 
large vote even if it is statistically weakened by the fuzzy logic 
uncertainty of what they would favor.

If I'd like to see Lojban match Esperanto's 2 million or even 50,000, the 
opinions of 250 Lojbanists are seen as rather small unless they are 
extremely one-sided. I try to avoid decisions that will alienate us from 
the possibility of that 2 million. That does make me a bit conservative.

> > On the other hand, much that is in Lojban is a radical departure from what
> > JCB was willing to accept, so to him I was a flaming progressive. At one
> > time YOU thought that the apostrophe was a radical idea, even though all it
> > did was explicitly display the phonological phenomenon we wanted to see
> > between disyllable vowel pairs. JCB never accepted it
>
>Alas, I am with JCB on this one. Even when I want to be baseline-compliant
>the apostrophe makes me want to puke. It's irrational of me, but it's
>an aesthetic reaction I cannot escape. I don't consider the apostrophe
>to be a fault or design flaw in Lojban. But I still hate it!

That was definitely one of MY innovations, for better or worse. But I'm 
not offended.

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