Subject: RE: Re: Well I guess you do learn something new every day...

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 04:47:48 -0700 (PDT)

Not going to partake in the latest And-Lojbab tiff, partly because of what
I'm going to say in the next email, partly because I'm now conflicted
between logicist and pragmaticist approaches to the language. But I can't
let this pass without comment:

[Lojbab]
>>After you'd created 25% of a language, you wanted
>>people to start using
>>it right away, and believed they wouldn't if you
>>carried on creating
>>the remaining 75%. So you leave it up to others to
>>collectively create
>>the remaining 75%, while trying to insist that the
>>first 25% remain
>>unchanged. This is all clear.

>It is quite unclear to me how people are able to
>communicate effectively in
>a language that you say is only 25% done.

The rhetoric is flying fast here, but Lojbab's claim is, I'm afraid,
bogus:

(a) The misunderstanding between PC and xod that led to the Great
Attitudinal Flamewar of 2001 was anything but evidence of people
communicating effectively in the language. I am not being facetious here,
either.

(b) It is eminently clear to me how people are able to communicate
effectively in a language only 25% done (although the numbers of course
are inherently arbitrary, and 75% would be a lot less inflammatory.) They
do so by glorking context, by relying on English-language models, and by
being cooperative. Both Nora and xod were doing quite well in speaking
Lojban at Logfest; both were also routinely dropping both "se" and "nu"
--- but I still knew what was going on. The reverse wasn't always true, I
grant you. :-)

There are gaps in the language, and everyone knows this. Writing
*introductory* lessons alone seems to have unearthed three or four. I
think everyone now also knows how these gaps are going to get filled in;
interminable bickering as before, but this time with some deliberate
attempt to set any consensus into stone by recording it with the new
computer tools we have. And abandoning the supplicatory model.

Anyway. Just thought I'd say that for the record.

== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing {le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri danlu}
[email-masked] -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge LLambias