From lojbab@lojban.org Fri Feb 18 23:15:04 2000 X-Digest-Num: 368 Message-ID: <44114.368.2022.959273826@eGroups.com> Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2000 02:15:04 -0500 From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" Subject: Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown At 08:15 PM 02/18/2000 -0600, Rex F. May wrote: >"Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" wrote: > > Yes. As long as it is to be "Loglan", the current system is defining. We > > felt extremely constrained in building Lojban to be consistent with JCB's > > ideas for the language and the grammar, and the fact that most of the > > changes to the classical language in the last 10-12 years have been exactly > > the same changes that we made for Lojban proves that we indeed were still > > following his lead. > > > > When we started Lojban in 1987, Nora suggested an even easier method of > > self-segregation - using a unique final vowel for ending words. The idea > > lasted about 1 minute, and we decided that it was not true to JCB's intent. > >Hmm. No offense, but that seems like an odd attitude, somehow. I mean, >I'd look critically at anything JCB didn't accept, but only because I respect >his instincts as the founder of the language. On the other hand, I suppose >that you felt that you specifically did _not_ want to go far afield enough to >have a fundamentally different language. I understand that, but don't >really understand why. To me, the play's the thing. Well, I think it stems partly from the fact that with the exception of Nora, the first four of us were NOT "conlang"ers, had never been bitten by the language invention bug and did not have much interest in the language invention process. We were interested in USING the language, and that meant getting something usable with a minimum of work. Tommy Whitlock and Gary Burgess both came from the polyglot linguist point of view for whom Lojban was another neat language to learn and maybe to analyze linguistically. Nora had been a language-inventor who had given it up when faced with Loglan which even in 1975 was far better than anything she had come up with. She also was focussed on using rather than inventing a language. And I was JCB's alienated (temporarily, I hoped) dictionary worker and community rebuilder, trying to document what other people had done, and totally uninterested in language invention, though I liked finding and fixing problems. Since I had no linguistics or language building experience at all, and was not all that proficient in Loglan myself (though that changed quickly), I had NO basis on which to counter JCB's instincts except the consensus of my fellow workers (if 3 Loglanists agree on something, it just may be right %^). My expertise was the rationalization and documentation of complex systems designs, since that is what I did professionally as a military systems contractor, and I tackled Loglan/Lojban as a documentation problem for a complex software project with faulty configuration management. It worked. Clearly our focus was totally on getting a product done. As I further contacted the then-Loglan community and realized how strong the demand for stability was, less and less consideration was made to anything but getting a set of language describing books out there for people to learn from. This quest for final definition and stability dominated until I taught the first Lojban class in 1989 using the draft textbook, and these relative beginners managed to poke a couple of big holes in the supposedly stable and final design. We went through a short spate of bug fixing for about 6 months and then resumed the quest for stability, but in the meantime, I had gotten distracted from the textbook writing process, which has never really been resumed. There were two other short periods of bug fixing, one when John Cowan became involved and seriously tackled understanding the YACC grammar - I am not a compiler person, and had put the Lojban YACC grammar together rather haphazardly. John, among other things rewrote the MEX and tense grammars to their current form, and in the process made things more systematic. The other major change at that time was the handling of sumti-raising, which was motivated as a bug fix but was largely an enhancement and not a change (a lot of place structures changed as a result of the problem analysis though). The other major bug fix came about when Colin Fine discovered a scope ambiguity in arguments with relative clauses (no idea whether TLI Loglan has dealt with this one yet), that forced a complete redesign of the internal grammar of sumti - one that changed almost nothing in actual usage but which looked completely different in the YACC grammar. I may have missed some small bug fixes, but almost all other changes were regularization of things already in the language (to simplify and clarify teaching) and enhancements to fill out the details of the fringes of the language when people found limitations in actual usage. Hmm, I never though I could manage in 6 paragraphs to summarize the bulk of what we did with JCB's language in 10 years. Other than these times I mentioned, change simply was something to be avoided. So for us, the play was not the thing, the completed product was. The Loglan community wanted a language to use, and only then would stop sitting on the sidelines. I promised them a stable and well-defined Loglan, which JCB did not agree was a priority, and even without completing our delivery of the description of that stable language, usage has taken off. With that usage, Lojban (and Loglan overall) has to a considerable extent ceased to be something that people can dispassionately decide to "change". I don't control it, which is why it is easy for me to promise the Lojban community to defend the Lojban baseline as we discuss the future of the language. Even if I was motivated to, I don't think I could change the baseline anymore - the community would revolt and I would lose, just as the community revolted in 1986 and started Lojban. And that, I hope, explains more fully why even if your morphology ideas were the greatest thing since sliced bread, we could never consider them as part of "Loglan". Another BTW. I argued with JCB over that damn 'ao' rhymes with >'cow,' thing in Loglan, insisting that it should be 'au.' And lo and >behold, you corrected it in Lojban. Now, the question is (and I do >mean this seriously, not at all sarcasitically, however it may sound) >how is it that you see that correction as an OK variation but the >nCnV not? That was a first-weekend decision Memorial Day 1987, as we attempted to establish algorithmically sound rules. The bottom line is that linguists describe that diphthong in terms of "au" (or "aw" using the semivowel), and we were trying to find low-error ways of encoding the sound-rules - I had to rely on 3 or more people working independently at a high productivity rate to do the 6 to 12 language dictionary lookups for 1000+ words needed to remake the words by the end of 1987, when a plain 8086 computer was still the most common machine. I supported what the polyglot linguists were comfortable with, and it had the nice advantage of being an identifiable minimal algorithmic difference from the "copyright" language (when we were still hazy on copyright law) and yet had no direct effect on the Loglan-88 prims (since prims do not have diphthongs). That many had argued with JCB over the issue, made it one of the few easy changes. It was only what was controversial within the 1979-83 Loglan community that we felt comfortable even considering for change. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org 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 (newly updated!)