Subject: Re: [lojban] FAQ: Lojban and Loglan (corrected)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2000 22:03:06 -0400

At 01:34 PM 05/24/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>First, what do they have in common, to make the question of
>differences relevant?
>1. They share the first thirty years of the history of the Loglan
>Project. The late Dr. James Cooke Brown started the project in 1955
>and published the first report of it in the Scientific American in 1960.
>After that he led it through two cycles of funding , development and
>enthusiast participation before the separation in the late 1980's.
>Loglan continued to be developed under that name by Dr. Brown's
>group, The Loglan Institute, while a separate group, The Logical
>Language Group, centered on Robert LeChevalier and John Cowan,
>continued its development under the name Lojban.

While John and I might be called "Lojban Central" today, in the first few 
years of the split I think that Nora, you, and Athelstan were at least as 
important. John C. did not even enter the scene until 1991. (Gary Burgess 
and Tommy Whitlock were cofounders and Jeff Taylor and Jeff Prothero helped 
on the early grammar work; once you start mentioning names it becomes hard 
to stop because we were never quite as monolithic as JCB's organization.)

It is also important from a legal standpoint that you add a reference to 
our right and intent to use the name "Loglan". We do not intend to lose 
what we won with difficulty. Something like "under the name 'Lojban', 
while using 'Loglan' as well to stress the project's continuity" or more 
blatantly "under the name 'Lojban', while reserving the right to use the 
name 'Loglan' as well". Likewise, at least at first mention, references to 
the continuation of the original project we have called 'TLI Loglan' so as 
not to deny to ourselves the right to call our work Loglan.

>The separation was over political issues of control of the language; it 
>did not directly affect the design features from the prior development.

This is a close approximation, but given 1. below (remaking the prims) and 
the later demand that we remake the grammar because of copyright claims, we 
did reexamine design controversies and made some minor changes. These 
changes did not affect anything at the broad level of your next 4 points 
below.

>2. First among these features, first order predicate logic formed the
>basic grammar of the language. To make a usable language Dr.
>Brown added such logical frills as identity, descriptions of various
>sorts, variables over predicates and reduction devices to bring higher
>order logic grammatically within the first order. More practically, he
>added devices for carrying on conversations: ways of forming
>commands, questions, exclamations, ways of expressing emotions, of
>referring to the passing scene and so on.
>3. But through all of this, he intended to keep the feature of first
>order logic that it is uniquely decomposable, has only one possible
>parsing. Early on this meant practically little more than that any
>string of sounds or letters that composed a legitimate Loglan
>sentence could be broken into words in exactly one way. In the end,
>however, both Loglan and Lojban have grammars which uniquely --
>and correctly -- parse every legitimate sentence of the language -- and
>computer programs that implement these grammars. This is a feature
>of no other language with a reasonable claim to be a full human
>language.
>4. At the heart of this system is a division of word classes on strictly
>phonological grounds: primitive predicates of form C'VCCV or
>CC'VCV, other predicates containing CC in their first five letters,
>ending in V and having penultimate stress (and a plethora of other
>conditions), names ending in C, and the remaining functional words --
>the logical, emotional, conversational, words as well as much of the
>necessary grammar -- spread over V, VV, CV, and CVV.
>5. The primitive predicates in each language derive from words for
>the corresponding concepts in the major languages of the world, in
>such a way as to maximize the recognizability of the created word by
>similarity -- perhaps not obvious ones -- with the home language of
>many people. In addition, each primitive predicate gives rise to one
>or more unique fragments which can combine to form new predicates
>with meanings derived from the meanings of the constituents. Each
>such compound is, of course, uniquely decomposable into its parts.
>
>But superficially a passage in Loglan and the same content in Lojban
>will look very different. This results from some of the conditions that
>created the split originally and from the years of independent
>development.
>1. One of the political issues was over who owned Loglan, with the
>Institute claiming to have in effect a copyright on every word of the
>language. To meet this problem, the Group recreated all of the
>primitive predicates, using the same algorithm but 1980 statistics
>(rather than 1950),

Not "1980", though "1980s", mostly 1984, though some words were made later.

> which gave a new list of major languages and new
>weights to them. In addition, the Lojban process took into account
>the need for unique compound-building fragments, which had been
>added late and ad hoc in Loglan. The result is that the two sets of
>primitives are entirely different (I haven't checked but I doubt there
>are more than a couple of real matches and probably as many
>homonyms).

Perhaps surprisingly there are 42-odd matches, and a few more 
homonyms. There are several other words which differ by only 1 or 2 
letters, though the differences are not predictable. However,in many 
cases, we have chosen a different place structure representation for 
primitive predicates based on different understandings of the semantic 
needs in speech and in compound-making, because of sumti-raising, and 
because of differences over absolute vs relative/comparative predication. 
(i.e. bluer than)

> The various parts of the little word (V, VV, CV, CVV)
>space were also reassigned, so the distribution of items in this area
>are quite different. Lojban has been quite enthusiastic in expanding
>some of the original categories of little words, so that direct
>correlates in Loglan are not always easy to find.

However, in converse, almost all TLI Loglan little words do have a direct 
correlate. Lojban is thus in a sense a superset of TLI Loglan.

>2. Further, to carry out some of these tasks, Lojban added an item
>to the phonology of Loglan and changed the representation of one
>sound. Lojban text contains ' and x; Loglan does not have the first
>and uses h for the second.
>3. Over the years, both the TLI and LLG have had to deal with a
>variety of problems in their grammars. Each has found solutions for
>these problems as they arose, but they have not generally found the
>same solutions. Thus, the two grammars -- while they agree over a
>large part of the two languages -- will give different parsing in some
>cases, perhaps one even rejecting what the other accepts.
>4. Similarly, over the years each group has had to decide what
>certain structures mean and how to say certain things. Again, the
>decisions have been made independently and thus usually differently.
>This extends even to the meaning (and place structure) of the
>primitive predicates of each language. However, it is probably the
>case that all the various meanings that one has accommodated the
>other has also, just differently.
>
>The grammar and basic vocabulary of Lojban are baselined and will not change
>for some time and then only under the strongest of pressures.

Do you want to put in the much debated baseline statement here? %^) The 
important thing is not that it will change only under strong pressure, but 
that we intend it to only change by internal evolution through usage by 
actual speakers, and not by imposition of changes to the language design 
prescription. This requires speakers, of course, and the "strong pressure" 
is only a corollary in that it might take such pressure to get the bulk of 
speakers to go along with a change that can be "imposed" only by internal 
usage.

> Loglan is
>officially still changing but has in fact been stable for several 
>years. Although the readily available grammar programs for both languages 
>are not the most up-to-date,

Our parser is considered as up-to-date as the baseline.

>they are enough to use for many detailed comparisons, with the expectation 
>being that significant differences in grammar will appear only in rather 
>remote and
>complex structures.

Again, the fact that Lojban is a superset of TLI Loglan enters in 
here. There ARE significant differences in such areas as the tense and 
mekso grammar, and in our wealth of attitudinals. I don't think these are 
particular complex structures, but it makes the comparison problem only 
one-way, as going from TLI Loglan to Lojban is rather easy.

>The case of vocabulary comparison is less certain, but
>it seems likely that fairly regular, if not automatic, correspondences can be
>made between the two languages, probably more easily from Loglan to Lojban
>than the reverse.

This seems certain - we should be able to create a predicate to fit 
arbitrary place structure and approximate meaning and assign it to the 
corresponding TLI Loglan word.

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