Subject: [lojban] Re: bridling hostility (was: RE: Re: the ethics of the HTML content meta tag

From: Robin Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 00:29:50 +0200

Invent Yourself wrote:
> On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Steven Belknap wrote:
> 
>>I prefer <lojbo> to <logji> here, although the latter would be closer
>>to being an exact translation of the English.
>>
>>la lojban po'e lo lojbo bangu (Loglan: A logical language)
> 
> Lojban: The Lojbanic Language. Wonderful, let's show the world our
> logic by offering a circular definition.

.u'isai

I really do think that this whole discussion is getting extremely silly. 
OK, legally Lojban is Loglan, and that was very important in creating 
the whole lobypli and getting us to where we are now. Several people put 
in a lot of time (and presumably legal costs) into establishing this, 
and they deserve credit for it. At that point in Lojban history, it was 
a crucial move, for a number of reasons that aren't worth going into 
here as they have been discussed repeatedly. However, we are now in the 
year 2002, in a position where we have Lojban, a constructed language 
with a small number of speakers and interested parties, and Loglan, a 
closely related constructed language with a smaller number of interested 
parties and virtually no speakers (unless things have changed radically 
in the last few years). Loglanists are aware of Lojban and will get 
involved in it if they want to; the rest of the world doesn't know and 
doesn't care.

So, my two pennorth. Lojban is lojban is lojban. This means that if we 
translate {la lojban.} into English, it should come out as "Lojban" and 
not "Loglan" or "Volapük". However, we are justified in describing 
Lojban as a variety, realisation or development of Loglan, and if that 
arouses the curiosity of Loglanists, that's fine, but it will mean 
nothing to the rest of the world who don't know what either Loglan or 
Lojban are. One article in "Scientific American" and a reference in a 
Heinlein novel counts for nothing in the eyes of the world.

As for HTML headers, two points. Firstly, it is permissable, in terms 
of netiquette, to include closely-related subjects in your keywords. 
The rule of thumb should be "If someone were searching for X, would 
she/he find this page useful or interesting?" Someone searching for 
"Loglan" would probably find Lojban of interest, so it's OK to have 
"Loglan" as a keyword (to give a counter-example, putting "renaissance" 
as a key-word in a gay porn site on the offchance that someone 
interested in the Renaissance might also like Michelangelo's "David" and 
therefore like pictures of other hunky guys, is stretching the point way 
too far).

The second point is whether modern search engines really take that much 
interest in what you put in your header. In the old days, when the WWW 
was relatively small and most of the people on it were reasonably honest 
(ah, nostalgia!) keywords could be relied on as a pretty good indication 
of what a page was about. Nowadays, AFAIK, people working for search 
engines are wise to the fact that webmasters include misleading 
keywords, so they don't take them seriously.

co'o mi'e solri.

(I've changed my moniker from robin.tr - which I adopted to avoid 
confusion with Robin Powell - to solri, since that is what most of my 
netfriends know me as, just so I have fewer aliases to cope with)