Subject: Re: [lojban] Editorial comment

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2001 12:38:18 EDT

In a message dated 7/18/2001 11:05:41 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> My concern now is that, as is becoming obvious, the ref grammar is still
> much too underspecified, so I would contend there is in fact a place for
> lessons ranging *beyond* what is covered in there. A language in which
> "John and I at least know what it's used for" can be said of *any* of
> its constructions (let alone {fa'a}) is still, I'm afraid, not ready for
> prime time. The kicker here is, most of these things *can* be cleaned up
> and made ready for prime time, without redesign or tinkering, but simply
> by someone strapping down the 'oracles' and documenting what has been
> used or said on the mailing list (or in camera --- or in the oracles' own
> minds.) (Whether this happens in lessons-format
> or dictionary-format or reference-grammar-format is not really relevant,
> as long as it's done.) I can't say
> I'm confident that this will happen soon, though, and I won't be the one
> to do it anyway.
> 

While I share Nick's concern that unclarities and even full gaps be taken 
care of, I am less sure that they are as many or as bad as he thinks, but am 
more sure than he that the way to fix them does not necessarily lie through 
Lojban Central, if the aim is to preserve something that can be called a 
logical language. LC comes in, I am sure, in preserving the freedom from 
syntactic ambiguity, since it contains the master grammar tweaker. But on 
the record of the last dozen years or so, the logical side of thing gets 
short shrift when compared to any number of other considerations, not 
excluding whether LC can figure what is going on after a dozen explanation 
attempts.
While I am not sure that the larger community would be more receptive (the 
evidence is not favorable, after all), there is more of a chance for logical 
maneuvers at least to be heard and tried if presented at large than if kept 
in LC. 
Now, in fact, most of the issues on hand at the moment are logical only in a 
very attentuated sense (do all the tenses fit within a single pattern or are 
there several different ones and, if the latter, what are they -- to which 
the first answer is pretty clearly that they do not all belong to a single 
pattern, but that is because they are not all tenses in the sense originally 
intended -- another case where logic lost out to something [God knows what] 
else). So the chances of destroying Lojban's vestigial claims to be a logical 
language (even the connection with the language of formal logic is pretty 
well gone) are slim. But still, I think trusting any decisions about the 
language to LC (which is, quite wisely, refusing to take it -- while making 
it hard for anyone else to) is not a course likely to lead to a happy result.