Subject: RE: [lojban] More stuff

From: Robert LeChevalier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 19:24:29 -0500

At 11:40 PM 12/7/02 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
>You are likely right about the lack of redundancy, but (a) it is
>unlikely to be a frequent problem, given that word recognition uses
>pragmatic as well as phonetic clues,

On the contrary, it has already been a problem. TLI Loglan had it with 
their numbers
(which are ni ne to te fo fe so se vo ve), which Bob Chassell and others 
had problems with, so I made the Lojban set what it is now - yet people 
object to re/rei. But we instituted our own redundancy problem with
se/te/ve/xe, a move that I much regretted later, but which was noticed in 
1989 when we first tried to have Lojban conversation. Meanwhile one of the 
principles behind TLI's Great Morphological Revision (GMR) in 1982 had been 
to eliminate collisions between gismu that sounded too close together 
(though they did not go so far as we did: they still have such pairs as 
garti/karti among their gismu).

Lojban has redundancy problems in lujvo though. Paralleling re/rei, Lojban 
might have balre/balrei, or ckire/ckirei (choosing a couple of lujvo that 
might plausibly mean something). The answer to lujvo collision is the 
option to expand them - someone mishears and says "ckirei ki'a" and the 
speaker says ciksypreti, but there is no answer to cmavo 
collision. Meanwhile le/lei have the same problems as re/rei, and anyone 
who has tried spelling words out orally in Lojban knows how much of a 
problem all the Cy alphabet words can be.

All this being the case, I suspect that fluent Lojbanists WON'T want to 
shorten things to their utmost, and JCB felt the same with Loglan. He 
always presumed that people would NOT necessarily choose the shortest 
lujvo, for example, and specifically wanted me to have a means to specify 
that the preferred lujvo form would be a longer form rather than a shorter 
one, if people preferred.

> and (b) adding devices to
>enhance concision would not have much of an effect on redudancy,
>pe'i.

Historically, we've already pushed the limit and it has pushed back.

> > >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
>
>That's not how factionalism works in the contexts where I see it
>(e.g. academic politics, national politics). Factions form for
>the mutual support of members -- "together we are stronger". There
>is no necessarily concomitant striving to dominate the entire
>polity.

I live in the US, where the Republicans and the Democrats both dream of 
"realignment" that would give their parties permanent majorities in the 
legislative branch, the judicial branch and the executive branch, and 
indeed DO seek to dominate the entire polity. Some fear that the recent 
election may have given this to the Republicans, whereas 25 years ago, 
everyone thought that Watergate would give the Democrats a permanent 
majority. The one saving grace that is obvious is that the closer that a 
group comes to achieving political domination, the more arrogant they 
become, sooner or later causing them to lose some of their support. But 
I'd rather not see American politics reflected in Lojban politics.

And of course this is the US. Other nominal democracies like Germany in 
1932 did lose their democratic nature when the dominant party became too 
dominant.

> > 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")
>
>If you are thinking of Mark II as a logical language, with its
>improvements being what makes it a better logical language than
>Lojban, then I don't think you're competent to judge, because
>by your own admission you have little interest or expertise in
>this side of things. It is not necessary to have internalized
>Lojban Mark I in order to design a better logical language, though
>it is helpful to be able to learn from Lojban's successes and
>mistakes.

The assumption behind Lojban Mark II is that SWH is true, and that fluent 
Lojban speakers NATURALLY speak and therefore think more logically than 
current people think even with effort. Then imagine a group of people 
raised on speaking Lojban and logic all their lives, and one would think 
that they would have major insights into the nature of logical thinking 
that we cannot guess at.

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