Subject: Re: [lojban] More stuff

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 13:19:50 -0500

At 02:41 AM 12/6/02 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
>As to tei/foi specifically (see, one more monosyllable), Unicode
>concretely says that tei .ebu .akut.bu foi decomposes as .ebu .akut.bu
>(that e acute is two characters).

Well, Unicode is a standard, and we could do OK to tie ourselves to a 
standard that will likely stick around. There was no standard 15 years ago.

> I don't think the sky will cave in if
>we say that in Lojban, all composed characters are read out as their
>constituent parts, with diacritic after character. We adopt one way of
>doing things rather than admitting complete freedom? Yeah, so? We do
>that all the time in Lojban: it's called having a syntax. If you insist
>that e-acute is to be considered a single character, then call it
>explicitly .e'akut.bu . If you want to be frisky about whether
>diacritics go before or after the letter (which tei/foi allow), I say,
>to hell with you. Lojban enforces precedence like there's no tomorrow
>in MEX; and it's to go all hippy with letterals? You can say either
>{.ebu .akut.bu} or {e'akut.bu}; you don't need to also be able to say
>both {tei .ebu ,akutbu foi} and {tei ,akutbu .ebu foi}. What possible
>point does such freedom serve? As for digraphs, I'd much rather
>{.a'ebu} than {tei .abu .ebu foi} for the ash (&aelig;)...

The only real issue here is respect for the cultures of other 
languages. Who are we (or Unicode) to say that n~ is really two letters 
rather than one, if Spanish speakers wish to allocate it separate status in 
their alphabet? Russian/Cyrillic likewise has diacritic characters in 
separate places of the alphabet from the non-diacritics. Of course the 
tei/foi thing was invented before name-bu, and in any case we were putting 
in multiple approaches because we did NOT want to favor one alphabetic 
system over another - unnecessary bias and all that. But if time and 
Unicode have rendered the argument moot, and all the characters of the 
world's orthographies, as well as the symbols of mathematics can be 
rendered with a Unicode strategy, then I won't fight too hard for 
maintaining a redundant form that no one will use if that level of baseline 
change is deemed worthwhile (I don't consider such changes to be 
justification for going to that level of baseline change, but if we are 
making changes at that level for issues of more import, justified 
simplification is a virtue worthy of consideration).

For baseline changes, I think there is a hierarchy of stability, and for 
any part of the language definition, we want to think multiple times before 
elevating the to a higher level of change consideration, because opening 
the door to one change invites other changes at the same level and sooner 
or later you won't recognize the language.

typo correction
clarification that does not contradict a viable denotation of the existing 
definition
clarification that basically admits I/we chose poor wording so that the 
denotation of the
existing definition is misleading
splitting of a word into two words to resolve polysemy
addition of a new word not justified by polysemy on a currently unassigned 
cmavo
(or adding a single line YACC grammar rule that changes no 
others, e.g. CAhA+NAI)
deleting an assigned cmavo because it is useless
addition of a new word reusing such a deassigned cmavo (seems much higher 
than using an
unassigned cmavo - I would support using xVV before reassigning 
tei even if tei is deleted

>{lau} is marginally more useful, but only marginally. Punct is not so
>frequent that the world would cave in if {lau} had an extra syllable.
>We've never used {lau} the one place where punctuation lerfu have been
>used extensively ---

We also haven't used multiple language notations. A lot of this came about 
because of MEX and other instances where languages use characters and 
punctuation from other languages/orthographies. We went for overkill 
because it was easy to see that any simple solution would be overwhelmed.

Now people might thing MEX and multiple orthographies are not important 
enough to waste cmavo on, but importance is a philosophical/values argument 
- and such people needn't use that part of the language. The value of 
brevity is similarly a philosophical/values argument, but it is countered 
by the fact that Lojban already is probably beyond workable limits on 
communications redundancy in cmavo and lujvo (i.e. too many short strings 
of Lojban that sound too much alike are grammatical and have plausible 
relevance), so that replacing something brief and rarely used by something 
more common only increases the likelihood of collision.

Lojban isn't Speedtalk, and was never intended to be.

>Factions exist; I define 'em, I defend them. We have different
>interests in Lojban, we don't want them marginalised. Bob may have
>defined Lojban to test SW,

No. JCB did, and many people are interested in the language from that 
point of view.

> and uses that to justify his rejection of
>defining any semantics. But if 90% of the community want a semantics,
>they prevail (as Bob admits, which is why he's consenting to a BPFK in
>the first place.)

Actually no. I'm consenting to a byfy because it will get a dictionary 
done and get us out of design phase; it's the first workable approach to 
offloading the job from Lojbab. If it solves other problems, all the better.

>And has no right to ban xod from pursuing SWism; xod
>has no right to tell And to abandon jboske. I don't even have a problem
>with individuals tinkering; I have a problem with it becoming
>politically dominant in the community, to the point of endangering
>language continuity.

And factionalism seems to me the attenpt to make one's personal goal for 
the language politically dominant, rather than being big-tent inclusive of 
all accommodating multiple goals even at the possible expense of optimizing 
for one goal

> (In fact, in yet another one of those reversals
>that Bob has been gracing us with of late :-)

Loosing up on the baseline in the short term, is precisely an example of 
what I just said - accommodating the jboskeists, and getting the dictionary 
done with multiple willing volunteers, at the expense of a relatively minor 
and temporary shift on baseline strategy, with your leadership providing a 
fundamentalist guardian of the baseline who is not tainted by aura of 
"cabal" accusations, with the need for consensus as a backup defense for 
ensuring language stability.

I don't see it as a reversal at all, but fully in keeping with balancing 
the multiple interests of ALL who use the language. My own interest 
(whatever it is) has always played second fiddle to this concept of my 
leadership role. And I will consider a LOT of things if needed to keep 
the tent big and the community homogenized rather than factionalized.

>he considers Lojbanist
>tinkering to be legitimate in providing us with Lojban Mark II --- as
>long as it happens after we're all dead or something :-) .)

No. I consider tinkering as something not part of the Lojban (Mark I) 
effort and not to be supported. But I also see no reason to believe that 
Lojbanists of the future with their superior Sapir-Whorfianly 
Lojban-derived mastery of logic and language, won't eventually try to 
develop a Lojban Mark II. It isn't part of this project though - not in 
the present or the future, and I don't think anyone without native (or 
perhaps PhD-level acquired) knowledge of Lojban is going to have 
internalized the language to the extent needed to make a quantum 
improvement, which is the implicit assumption in calling it "Mark II").

>We must arrive at a common standard. But we do so, I believe, by
>acknowledging we want different things, and seeing how we can work our
>way around that; not by suppressing or ignoring that difference.
>
>But that isn't quite parliamentary democracy either. Parliamentary
>democracy works by majority rule, not consensus, after all.
>
>Or maybe I'm just naive. :-) We'll see...

You aren't naive. Consensus politics is difficult to learn and practice, 
and no discipline overtly teaches it as a skill, though the maneuvering of 
academia probably comes close. But it leads to superior results when it 
can be practiced.

>Look, we gotta work together. If I have my way,
>I'll get And and xod and Jay and Robin and Jordan and everyone with
>something to say into the same place, and we'll all produce a
>dictionary. That means we accept there are constraints on what we do.
>It also means we accept each other's bonafides.

(Rock!) to quote Robin. %^)
You've just summarized everything I want for the byfy in one paragraph.

lojbab

-- 
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org