Subject: On a number of parts of threads and single threads disguised as several

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 22:23:07 EDT

I am not adverse to suggesting changes even in these frozen times and intend 
to continue to do so, but I am often relieved to find that they are already 
solved in unexplored corners of the language or by rethinking the problem. 
On the other hand, I can't help but notice that what we have so far in 
teaching aids are often not the place to find these secret bits, but rather 
the usage of the few people who do use the language a lot -- though even they 
sometimes do violence to what little does seem to be clear. Now, spread over 
a number of threads -- and hidden away in threads ostensively on some other 
topic altogether -- we have several lines of attack on the present system of 
Lojban. 
One line is to suggest that there are all sorts of things that Lojban doesn't 
do or doesn't do well, although, for each problem suggested, at least some 
serious users claim to see a way to do it and one that is neither baroque (in 
the Lojban context anyhow) nor even significantly longer or more complex than 
the proposed change/addition.
Another line is to suggest that there are large parts of frozen Lojban that 
are so ill-defined that the freeze is essentially meaningless. The evidence 
for this is just that several different users use the same item in 
incompatible ways while all appealing apparently accurately to the same 
"standard."
A third line insists that these "problems" arise only because the propounders 
do not "live in Lojban" enough and so have biased views of what the language 
can and cannot do. They show this by carrying on their discussion in 
English, of course.
A fourth line see the problem as educational, to find an extremely 
introductory textbook that provides just enough to start a bootstrap 
operation (one of JCB's favorite concepts) whereby one can know enough Lojban 
to ask question in Lojban about how to go on to the next step in Lojban, say.

Well, writing any text book is a bitching awful job and an introductory 
language one more so than most -- especially when you have no culture to fall 
back on, as you would with a nat lang. So, maybe Nick's appeals to a more 
sophisticated lot than the average intake from TrekNet, but then, so does 
Lojban, and so we can probably make some progress with it until the next 
version comes along. An Cowan's Book is said not to be for teaching but for 
recording and so it accurately records some of the glitches of creation: 
things put in because they seemed to fit a pattern, even if it was not quite 
clear what they did there; things left out from haste or because someone 
didn't undertand it; things differently described in different places because 
different stages of history were never reconciled; and so on. So there is 
clearly room for creativity -- even innovation -- within the baselined 
language. And an agreed-upon (with exceptions of course) method for coming 
to a decision by consensus of usage. Hopefully out of this may yet grow that 
community that discusses its problems with Lojban in Lojban. But that will 
take some time, for the simple reason that there are enough uncertainties 
about simple things that we cannot yet formulate the question in Lojban -- 
nor the answers either -- let alone the arguments for one answer rather than 
another (look at most of the attempts in this direction). But that does not 
mean that Lojban cannot be used for a wide range of other things (Greek got 
good at talking about Greek only after Homer, Hesiod, the Attic tragedians, 
the Old and Middle Comedians, Plato, Thucidides, and so on -- a mass of data 
at least.) Robin's and now Nick's story is clearly on the right track, 
whatever may be said about the discussions that go with it (or, indeed, about 
the details of the language used). After a certain point, you can't do 
language design in a vacuum from language use (well, you can -- as witness 
the Institute for many years, but you never get a real language out of it). 
So write a nice story -- or translate one, create a literature (and, at least 
by implication, a culture) for Lojban, against which to start making 
linguistic judgments. How do you say it? Well, what does it mean 
functionally in Lojbankuln? How would you say that? And use the unclear 
ones; that's how they become clear -- after the battle of clarifications.