Subject: Re: [lojban] response to And

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2002 18:23:13 +0000

Nick:
#> 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. 

Right. That's beyond dispute. As I've said before, it can be hard to tell
whether the text contravenes the semantics specified in the baseline;
because it involves making guesses about what the author intended
to say. The most we can say is "We assume the author meant to
say X, but the sentence actually means Y, so if our assumptions about 
the author's intentions are correct, then the text is not baseline-compliant".

[...]

#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.

I find Lojbanists' ideas about figurative lg somewhat confused.
Is the sentence "This teddy is a cribe" 100% true? Not if cribe
means 'bear'. If the sentence is 100% true, then cribe means
something other than 'bear'.
Is the sentence truish? Arguably, yes, in a fuzzy logic model.
Is the sentence communicatively flawed, or stylistically reprehensible?
Absolutely not. Figurative language is natural and in no way 
icnompatible with a logical language.

#> 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.

If we could somehow simulate the Elephant and flag arguments
and counterarguments in the subject line, it might be easier to
stay tuned in. Failing that, perhaps each BF discussion topic
could be assigned a chairperson-cum-secretary, responsible
for shepherding the discussion.

#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. 
[...]
#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.

I think that jboske discussion for batches of (say) 10 cmavo could be
wrapped up in 30 days, if the discussion has a shepherd, which gives
you an average of 3 days per cmavo. Actually, I'm sure you'd be hoping
for a much quicker rate, as would I.

As for the method, I'd envisage something like: Someone makes
a proposal. P1. If nobody makes a counterproposal, P1 stands. If
somebody counterproposes P2 (P3, P4), this is debated, but in the
context of trying to arrive at a recommendation to feed in to the BF,
not of trying to investigates all the jboskological ins and outs. For as 
long as *new* arguments and counterarguments arise, the debate 
continues, and revised proposals can be made and earlier proposals 
retracted. There are very few issues so thorny that this would carry 
on for very long. Once the flow of new arguments has dried up,
the final unretracted proposals can be voted on and submitted to
BF with some indication of the degree of consensus they command.

#> 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?

I'm not sure quite what you mean. All CVVV are currently legal but
+experimental. I propose instead classifying cmavo as follows:

I. cmavo assigned a selmaho and meaning in official documentation
II. cmavo assigned a selmaho in official documentation but not a
meaning
III. cmavo assigned a selmaho and meaning in currently unofficial 
documentation
IV. cmavo not assigned a selmaho or meaning in any current 
documentation

How can a speaker indicate which class a cmavo belongs to? By 
using za'e (from memory -- I mean the nonce cmavo) or sei.
How can a hearer know which class a CVVV cmavo belongs to?
They can't. But so what? Knowing the class isn't going to help
them find out what the cmavo means.

#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.

One might go further and say "this is revising the lexer, and necessarily
not revising the grammar itself". The Lojban design as it stands allows
for new cmavo, but not for new selmaho.

#>> 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.

I have often had the experience of one person asking "what does cmavo
X mean", and other people racking their heads as to what, given the
minimal info in CLL and the mahoste, it could possibly mean. Often
the process takes the form "Well, we have no idea what it could mean,
so let's invent a meaning that seems useful and is compatible with
Woldy and the mahoste". These are the cases I'd prefer to leave to
Usage's Decision.

#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.

I notice myself and many others engaging in syllable counting as a
heavily weighted criterion for stylistically evaluating a sentence.

On its own, this makes concision merely a nice benefit, when it's
available. But as I said in other messages, the design of Lojban
tends to make logical precision more longwinded, which, in various
ways which I won't go into now, militates against Lojban's 
effectiveness as a logical language. Indeed, in its 'built in stylistics'
Lojban seems suited most of all to helsemry.

#> (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, 

Me, I sincerely find it way the most elegant solution.

#and it's gotten much scorn on the wiki. 

It hasn't -- just one unreasoned tirade. 

#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. 

I think the proposal would only work during a prescriptive phase, 
albeit far in the future.

#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.

There's no point in doing stuff that doesn't carry a portion of the
community along with it. Even now, with the freeze and the baseline,
people can choose to ignore it.

#>> 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. 

I have no problem in accepting it. I think it harms the language if people 
use sentences as if their semantics was more underspecified than it actually 
is, though.

#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.

See my remarks earlier this message. Essentially the problem is that in
trying to judge a *text*, we must have access to the author's intentions.

--And.