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

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 09:53:56 -0400 (EDT)

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, Nick NICHOLAS wrote:

>
> 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:

I hope these two approaches can converge.

It seems to me, specifically because I have done no real work on the
issue, that we might be able to 'speak predicate logic' in a way that's
easier than the analogous representation in English.

Pondering the issue with anaphora & indirect questions, it occurred to me
that maybe the best way to deal with those issues and others like it that
may arise in the future is to develop a strong, general purpose method.
That method would be our formal logic method, with da and zo'u. But
is there anything we could do to that treatment to make it smoother to
conceptualize? I personally am not even sure how to use it to express the
test sentences in question!

> [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.

That misunderstanding was based only on a single cmavo, "dai", and my
usage, though possibly non-standard, was logical and was understood by
some Lojban readers. With that context it doesn't sound like a big deal.

> (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. :-)

I don't want my lack of dexterity at Lojban to reflect upon Lojban itself.
The fact remains that we don't know what fluent Lojban will sound like,
and thus we don't know how complete the language is: how different will
that fluent usage differ from the examples in the Book?

-----
"I have never been active in politics or in any act against occupation,
but the way the soldiers killed Mizyed has filled me with hatred and
anger. Now I'm ready to carry out a suicide attack inside Israel,"
one of the witnesses said.