Subject: [lojban] Re: Loglan

From: Robert McIvor <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 17:25:09 -0500

On Dimanche, déce 1, 2002, at 20:47 US/Eastern, Robert LeChevalier 
wrote:

> 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.

So did all members of the Academy. We usually managed to argue to a 
concensus,
but I used my veto power successfully on two of JCB's changes that I 
thought were inconsistent with Loglan principles. I would say that the 
Academy followed And's opinion. Maintain the status quo, but be open 
to extensions and corrections as needed.
The commonest changes were assignment of unassigned rafsi, and place 
structure modification, though I resisted changes to places to 
well-known words. Any author could add lujvo as needed.

> 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.)

At the time Lojbab refers to, the vocabulary was in a mess, which was 
prior
to the GMR (Great Morphological Revision) with introduction of rafsi 
and rules for
constructing lujvo which were adopted by Logban when separation took 
place.
The name of your 'slinkui' rule is based on a Loglan word 'paslinkui' 
which could
break to pa slinkui if slinkui were a legitimate word. Actually, later 
we abandoned the
slinkui restriction by requiring paslinkui type words to be hyphenated 
as pasylinkui.

> 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.

Academy decisions were published in Lognet, and if the grammar was 
affected,
which became ever rarer, incorporated therein. I consider anything 
which parses with the current grammar (which has no YACC ambiguity) as 
syntactically correct Loglan, though JCB would consider a lot of such 
sentences bad usage.
>
> So no, I don't think that JCB even understood a baseline, much less 
> favored
> one.

He probably understood one, but certainly did not favour one.