Subject: Re: ka'enai (was: Re: A question on the new baseline policy)

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 00:48:20 +1100

cu'u la xod.
> On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, And Rosta wrote:
>
>> Anyway, if the conservatives won, I wonder how
>> many "ka'enai" users would stop using it. Not many, I suspect.
>> Maybe Nick, depending on his mood on a given day. So you're likely
>> to end up with a baseline that is followed only in those aspects
>> that command intrinsic respect.
> A very interesting and worthy point. If the BF's decisions will be 
> ignored
> by significant fractions of users, why should it bother making them? 
> This
> is a case of the leaders seeing where the people are going, running 
> out in
> front of them, and then claiming to lead them.

Zinger upon zinger; in all seriousness, this community is privileged to 
have both of you in it.

I think ka'enai will be a litmus for Lojban; as someone on the wiki 
said (was it Robin.CA?), ka'enai will be the Lojban "ain't". We have 
two clashing imperatives: analogy, which is how natural languages work, 
and unambiguity, which is how engelangs work. They conflict.

Assuming that Jordan and John are right, and that ka'enai is hopelessly 
vague:

I think the grammar needs to be swayed by fundamentalist and formalist 
criteria --- no change unless broken (where 'broken' does not just mean 
'inconvenient', but 'contradictory' or 'ambiguous'). Real human beings 
don't talk like robots, you'll say, they'll want to make the analogy. 
Accepted. And real human beings will not abide by 100% of the current 
Lojban grammar, either. The grammar *was* designed for robots, and 
represents a standard which people will not necessarily speak 
rigorously. i frankly don't see the point in the machine grammar 
continuously morphing to keep track with the natural evolution of the 
language (to the extent it happens): an unambiguous syntax is a selling 
point in its own right, and spoken Lojban will always butt against it.

So let's leave the grammar alone. The grammar is stupid in many, many 
ways, whether this is an instance or not; but I don't regard us as 
having a mandate to make it more convenient, learnable, or sensible --- 
just to prevent any ambiguity. I will rejoice if people 'subvert the 
baseline' on this one; but throwing this kind of thing open for 
prescription now is just too risky, and I don't see the point. Let 
Lojban have its "ain't": if you forestall one instance of people 
generalising away from the syntax, you won't be able to forestall them 
all.

And is quite right to characterise me as a weathervane. Whether I'm 
developing a coherent ideology yet, I can't really tell. Maybe I just 
won't.

The business of the leaders is to run in the same general direction as 
everyone else; the point being, I suppose, that the leaders diagnose 
what that direction is, because the population running often can't 
tell. That's why I preferred your formulation of 'Standard Lojban'. But 
there are a couple of other imperatives the BPFK needs to follow first 
--- fundamentalism and formalism-lite: a commitment to unambiguousness, 
at least, even if not outright formalisation. (The 'aims of the 
language' that the board statement speaks of.) Sometimes, people 
haven't been running in that direction at all. In this kind of 
situation, though, when the formalism-lite imperative is brought up, 
people usually accept it and change their usage (e.g. ce'u). I'm not 
saying naturalism-lite doesn't achieve this either (past usage all 
other things being equal --- e.g. vo'a).

---
DR NICK NICHOLAS. [email-masked]
FRENCH & ITALIAN, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.
In Athens, news spreads fast: they know everything as soon as it 
happens,
sometimes before it happens, and often without it happening at all.
--- Jean Psichari, _My Voyage_. http://www.opoudjis.net