Subject: Re: response to And

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 18:51:18 +1100

And:
> 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".

Well, I should hope anyone doing baseline-compliance checking is in 
communication with the author! I'm in favour of giving the benefit of 
the doubt if the author is unavailable.

This addresses baseline-compliance as defined by committee, though. And 
you have your text checked for compliance only if you want to. If you 
don't give a fig for the baseline after the freeze, then go ahead and 
do your thing.

Until the freeze expires, though, where the baseline says the semantics 
should be X, and you do Y, you contravene the baseline.

This will not go down well; and that's why any semantics that arises 
out of the BPFK has to be as restrictive as the community will allow, 
and not further. Formalists can do their own tighter semantic 
prescription apres freeze, on their own dime, without LLG sanction, and 
without prescriptive force over the community. It may well be a fun 
venture; but it's not this venture.

Eh, I think we're in agreement...

> 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'.

That is indeed the CLL view, so I'm afraid we're stuck with it as 
baseline, and am reluctant to revisit it.
> #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.

Oh, I want the discussion as navigable as possible. I don't want a 
free-form mailing list, actually, but something like a separate 
bulletin board for each cmavo, with understanding that early positions 
are flagged. If people want to get emails of the discussions, we should 
set up so that people subscribe to individual cmavo they care about, 
and get digest emails.

> 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.

Well. This is closer to what I wanted, certainly, though not quite it.

No detailed jboskology, certainly: this is not the full jboskological 
description, but the core common understanding. For example, the 
epistemological status of lo'e may well be left out of discussion.

I don't want new stuff brought up, I want the old stuff gone over. If 
new stuff has to be brought up, well, what am I to do, new stuff will 
be brought up. But we must get the lore in order first.

So we're close, but people read to really take to heart that this is 
not jboske. I envisioned jboske discussion as background to what the 
BPFK does, not what the BPFK does itself. If the jboskologically minded 
want to take an issue to jboske they can, but I think BPFK as a body 
should be debating on the cmavo-specific bulletin boards, in strict 
structure.

(This is a shift in my methodology statement, and I'm putting it up for 
discussion.)

> #*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 meant +exp, of course.

> 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

We have I, III and IV currently, so the issue is II, your Usage Decides 
cmavo. I don't think this will fly either, but whatever, this can be 
discussed.

> #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.

I'm OK with that. Of course, we both understand by that what linguists 
understand by grammar, which is that the lexer (lexicon) and the parser 
(grammar) are distinct entities, and changes to one are separate from 
changes to the other.

> 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.

Still don't like it. Let's wait until we get to a cmavo that we really 
don't know how to make sense of. My guess is, people will still prefer 
to invent something useful, and will wait on Supplication before making 
up their minds.

> 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.

*shrug* I see it is a concern, though I'm not convinced it's a massive 
problem, and other than limited things like moving around the 
occasional cmavo, I don't see that I have a mandate to do much about it 
now.

[lexer preprocessing]
> #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.

Which presupposes that people will still be writing parsers for Lojban 
in 50 years. If it evolves naturally, I'd say they can't -- at least, 
not a parser for conversational Lojban. I don't see how we can prevent 
anyone from doing preprocessor tricks in 50 years time. I can see that 
we won't be doing them in the next 5.

> #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.

In which case I don't see what our disagreement is.

> #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.

Ideologically I agree; but in practice, as you've found here yourself, 
there is more resistance to formalising -- and policing -- semantics 
than syntax. But yes, if the dictionary says, I dunno, lo'e-squinting 
is local (which I think it shouldn't, but that's for jboske), then I 
expect Lojbanists to use lo'e that way in order to be within baseline. 
If Lojbanists insist on the freedom to choose how they squint, then 
this becomes yet another Usage Decides, typically resolved by the Grice 
Salvator. You and I want more stuff formally decided; others want much 
less. This will be haggling.

[Grice Salvator: see Wiki. global squinting: what you can say about 
lo'e merko is objectively based on the properties of all 300 million 
Americans. local squinting: what you can say about lo'e merko is 
subjectively based on the properties of the Americans you actually 
know. I think. But I haven't gone through jboske list yet.]

== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing | le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri 
danlu
[email-masked] | -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge 
LLambias