Subject: response to And

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 01:46:14 +1100

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 19:08:04 -0000
From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: Re: Why we should cancel the vote or all vote NO (was RE: 
Official Statement- LLG Board approves new baseline policy

>> 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.

Not sure how to respond. If a text contravenes the syntax or semantics 
specified in the baseline, it is not baseline-compliant. Is this 
normative pressure? Yes; not binding, but it is there. I'm envisioning 
the post-baseline Academy as formalist but not revisionist, after all. 
Is the usage violating lore and common norms, but sticking to official 
syntax and semantics? Then it is baseline compliant. It's being 
non-communicative and self-indulgent, and I may choose to refuse to 
read it (the reaction dotless lojban induces in me); but I can't say 
it's un-Lojbanic if it follows the letter of the Lojban prescription, 
though not the lore around it.

Helsem is not being ungrammatical, and is not doing anything stupid 
with the semantics; he's being figurative, but to my annoyance even 
John defends what I'd regard as figurative language in gismu (a teddy 
bear is still {cribe}.) So Helsem has a good chance of getting baseline 
compliance.

Whether his writing becomes stylistically normative... well, that's a 
different thing. But while xod has charged any such body with 
documenting standard Lojban -- which has a standard Lojban style --- 
I'd feel its prescriptions to have more moral force for what is in the 
baseline (syntax, core semantics) than what is outside it (connotation, 
discourse conventions, style.)

> 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).

Weeell, to an extent. But I tune out of jboske now, and will do so in 
the future. I need to be allowed to do so, and tune in only for what I 
deem vital.

And I do stand my ground on the 'sudden death' method. This places the 
onus on one Lojbanist to produce a 'record' of what has been said, and 
what the meaning should be now; put it to vote; and only debate it if 
proposal and counterproposal both fail. We cannot afford a month of 
debate for every cmavo in the list, And. We just can't. If Lojban lore 
has produced anything, I charge cmavo documenters to demonstrate that 
by their summary of the lore. This *is* guillotining debate, and I 
insist on it. In the worst case, you end up indeed debating every 
single cmavo for a month on jboske, and every second cmavo for a year. 
I am allowing jboske discussion, but I am not encouraging it; and if 
this worst case eventuates, I will deem my mission to have failed, and 
I will walk away from the BPFK.

So now you know where I stand. ;-) It's hard to draw such a line in the 
sand on what is a very gradual criterion (how much haggling on jboske 
is too much?); but like I say, I want prior discussion to be exploited 
as much as humanly possible in this process, and renewed discussion 
only as a last resort. If you think jboske discussion for each cmavo 
brought up there can be wrapped up in three days, I'll consider 
changing my mind. If you can't guarantee me that, I won't.

> 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.

*shrug* I think it a cop-out, and even articulating the two distinct 
candidate meanings s a devil of a task, as we found with loi'e/lo'ei. 
It may short-circuit the process, but it certainly doesn't eliminate 
the need for prior investigation.

> 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}.

*shrug again* Perhaps. But M1 is still privileged. And if I make all 
CVVV legal, then how do you make novel experimental cmavo for ta'e?

> 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.

So you are questioning the need for a distinct exp.cmavo class. (You do 
so again explicitly at the end of your message.) And you're doing so in 
terms that naturalists can agree with. And I can't. Well, we'll vote on 
that when the time comes. To those who howled in protest about this: if 
you want Lojban to remain parseable after the freeze ends, you will 
have to allow that new cmavo can turn up in the language, at least in 
existing selma'o. Function words are a closed set, but 'closed' never 
means 'hermetic'. And this is revising the lexer, not necessarily the 
grammar itself.

>> 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.

Rhetorical exaggeration. In all cases, we have some indication of what 
the meaning is. All current cmavo are usable --- not all are usable 
with confidence. But this is a sidetrack.

> (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.)

I would make the threshold fairly low, and deprecate rather than 
eliminate the old assignment. And this ain't the time to decide that 
either.

I think the reassignment hasn't got much chance, and I think your 
hangup on CVV vs. CV'V is specious (lo'edu'u is longish, but lo'e and 
du'u on their own aren't.) But that's not an ex cathedra statement.

> (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.

I think this is a kludgey way of doing things, and it's gotten much 
scorn on the wiki. I think this is compatible with the baseline if you 
squint long enough, but frankly I'd rather that ruling be made fifty 
years from now. Without a freeze, people can do what they want with the 
machine grammar anyway; I don't see what would constitutionally prevent 
it, in that case.

If you just shuddered in horror at that prospect, welcome to 
fundamentalism. Your vote will ensure that the grammar remains 
inviolate in perpetuity (and drifting away from spoken Lojban, which is 
something you'll have to be reconciled with if you stay a 
fundamentalist.)

>> 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.

Some semantics shall remain underspecified and resolvable by Gricean 
salvator; accept this. In such an instance, the baseline has nothing to 
say. Where the baseline does have something to say, it says it. If you 
intend to say "everybody speaks a language", and you say {lo bangu cu 
ve tavla fo ro prenu}, you are violating the current baseline if you 
insist that {lo bangu cu ve tavla fo ro prenu} must also mean 
"everybody speaks a language". That scoping is in black and white in 
CLL. Where semantics is specified, it is frozen.

This is why Bob doesn't want any semantics specified, of course.

> 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'm not optimistic about it either, but it needs to be tried. We have 
already agreed that supplication shall not be binding; if Bob's 
recollection is demonstrably bogus, the BPFK will reject it and come up 
with something more useful. I do not regard that as a mandate to kill 
the cmavo; and I think it will result in deallocating the cmavo as you 
suggest only in extreme cases where we can see no conceivable use for 
the beast. You'll have quite a battle there, I expect.

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