Re: your mail

la stiv. rais. cusku di'e:
>     I have noticed a distressingly rude habit in some of these
> postings:  referring to Loglan as "Institute Loglan."  Now, if you
> wish to entertain the notion that "Loglan" is a generic term, fine;
> though it is ambiguous and quite unnecessary.  The generic term
> "predlang" already exists, and is more precise. After all, there have
> been several "logical languages" in the past few centuries.  The
> distinctive feature of Loglan and Lojban is use of predicates.
> (There's an enormous differrence between predicate-oriented and
> non-predicate-oriented languages.)  I should also point out that,
> contrary to what you may have heard, the legal status of "Loglan" is
> as yet undecided.

"Institute Loglan" is a short version of "the version of the Loglan
language currently promulgated by The Loglan Institute".  Of course,
there are other languages which can be called "Loglan", notably the
1960, 1966, 1975, and 1982 versions of the language, in addition
to "Lojban - A Realization of Loglan", commonly called "Lojban".

I fail to understand in what sense the term "predlang" may be said to
"exist".  I do not find it in any of my dictionaries, and have not
seen it in print other than in Steve Rice's writings.  As far as the
evidence goes, it is a far more recent coinage than "Loglan" or "Lojban".
If it is taken to be a mere abbreviation for the descriptive term
"predicate language", then -gua!spi is a predicate language as well,
although it is not Loglan.

Finally, the "legal status of 'Loglan'" is undecided only in the sense
that the appeals process has not yet been exhausted.  TLI is appealing
to the U.S. Appellate Court, and may further appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court, but no new issues of fact may be raised by either appeal.

> If you feel that it is
> justifiable to take over from TLI a term which it originated, used as
> a special term unchallenged for some thirty years, and has never
> ceased to use in that fashion in copyrighted works, your ethical
> system and mine are too far apart for us to even discuss matters.

Many persons outside TLI use and have used "Loglan" as the name of the
Loglan language in any of its varieties.  TLI's claims to proprietary
use cannot be sustained.

>     Phonemics and transcribing the digraph:  It's easy enough to find
> minimal pairs for epsilon and the digraph in English, though I still
> think mapping three English phonemes onto one Group Lojban phoneme is
> asking for trouble.  In particular, I'd point out that it's rather
> hard to find minimal pairs for epsilon and the digraph in English
> names, but quite easy to find such pairs for the phonemes mapped onto
> Group Lojban "a":  Don/Dan, Jack/Jock, etc.  When I first saw "salis",
> I took it as the Group Lojban version of "Solly".

As, of course, it could have been.  An obvious minimal pair for [ae] and
[E] is "Jan" and "Jen", both English names, quite different in origin
and significance.  But in the end names are assigned by the namer.
Of the two Erics on lojban-list, one is ".erek."; the other finds this
unacceptably ugly and chooses to be ".eiRIK."  Loglan allows this variation.

>     In referring to problems in deriving primitive predicates, I
> relied on your own gismu list.  If "censa" neither contains nor
> resembles the English word "sacred", then the English word is
> worthless as a mnemonic.  On a similar note, it's unreasonable to
> expect an ordinary English-speaker to hear a /i/ in "later", as is
> apparently required for "balvi" to work.

What of it?  Some Loglan words will have low or zero scores in some
languages:  the word "blanu", which has remained unchanged from 1960
to the present in all versions, has zero contribution from Japanese,
so no Japanese word can serve as a "mnemonic" for it.  Similarly,
the Institute Loglan word "cidja" (awake) has a zero contribution from
English.  Again, what of it?

>     Identities:  You seem to be committing ther same mistake as some
> Transformational-Generative people I've encountered:  confusing a
> model of grammar with grammar itself.  Loglan is a real language, so
> it and its grammar are found not on some computer but in the minds of
> Loglanists.

I agree.

> You might as reasonably confuse a sqare and a rectangle:
> all square are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.  If an
> utterance is grammatical, it will parse; but not all that parses is
> grammatical in terms of The Grammar as known by speakers.

Then the parser is poorly designed.  The Lojban machine grammar states
exactly what is and what is not grammatical in the language.

> Otherwise,
> you don't have a language, just a linguistic computer game.  (Let me
> know whether you win or the Klingons do.)

So you believe that if a full parser for English were to be developed,
English would cease to be a language because the parser made the same
grammaticality judgements as a native speaker?

>     It's true that the computer sees "bi" as a type of predicate
> LEXEME, but that's not to say that "bi" is a predicate in speakers'
> minds.  It isn't in mine, for example.

JCB differs from you.  He refers to members of BI as "little word
predicates" (NB3, p. 76) and refers explicitly to "identity predicates"
(NB3, p. 128).

>     Another example of this confusion is Cowan's recent claim that a
> mathematical identity such as "Lio topoito bi lio fo" (2+2=4--I don't
> recall his example right off) is a predication, a "fact" of
> mathematics.  I would suggest that, while you may be in a position to
> pontificate about Group Lojban semantics, before doing so about
> Loglan, you should bother to learn the language.  The utterance in
> question is an identity, not a claim, though a claim could be
> constructed quite easily in Loglan, and probably in Group Lojban as
> well.  I won't insult your intelligence by explaining further; if the
> method's obvious to a mere Loglanist, it must be self-evident to Group
> Lojbanists.

What I said was that "2 + 2 = 1 + 3" represented a truth.  (I chose this
form to avoid quibbles about whether "2 + 2 = 4" could be said to define
"4".)  I do not believe that this represents a mere definition of a
convention.  See Quine, >Word and Object<.

>     In fact, based on this and other instances of pseudo-Loglan, I can see why
> Brown's bugged.  I thought it was a mere matter of having the Institute's work
> ripped off.  But now I think rather that he's (justifiably) afraid that you're
> contaminating the experimental area--spitting in the test-tube, so to speak--by
> misrepresenting Loglan semantics and metaphysics.  Do what you will with
> Lojban, but please have the courtesy to leave Loglan out of it.

Lojban is Loglan.

>     Passing thoughts:  I'm less of a Zipfoid than most of the people
> at TLI, though I acknowledge the general validity of his views.  lojbab says
> that Loglan's case tags are bad (Bad tags! Bad tags!) on three counts:
> 
> 1.  Linguists can't agree on how many cases there are.  True from the
> standpoint of universal grammar, false from the standpoint of a given
> language (e.g., Loglan).  It's not too hard to figure out how many
> cases a language needs to account for its syntax.  The trick is coming
> up with a system which works for everybody.  Now, Loglan is A
> language, not ALL languages, so there's no problem.

You seriously defend JCB's 11 cases?  Look at the lists in NB3 again,
and check out how much shoe-horning has been done.

>     I'm also informed that Group Lojban doesn't have the full spectrum
> of ethnic forms found in Loglan.  
[examples deleted]
> In Group Lojban, such concepts are handled with complexes ("lujvo" is
> the local shibboleth, I think).  
[examples deleted]
> In effect, you're telling
> me that as a Loglanist, I have more choices than you Group Lojbanists
> do.  Whillikers, fellers, I'm crushed.

Your 4 different prims cannot be used differentially in complexes, so
what's the point of having them?  They save no syllables, and only a few
letters, plus making a pointless exception to a simple rule (no two prims
differ in the final vowel alone).

> In parting, I leave you with the words of the great philosopher Marx:
> 
>     "Loi.  I oa mi godzi. I oa no mi stolo. I mi kamla rau lepo cutse
> lepo mi godzi.  I ui mi kamla.  Ibuo oa mi godzi.  I loa!"

Or in Lojban:

	coi .i ei mi klama .i ei naku mi stali .i mi klama ki'u le nu cusku
	le nu mi klama .i ui mi klama .i ku'i ei mi klama .i co'o

Note the word-for-word nature of this translation, which is nonetheless
sound and idiomatic Lojban.  Are these really two languages, or is Lojban
just what we say it is -- a relexification of Institute Loglan,
with corrections and extensions?

Note:  Lojban has only "klama" to represent Institute Loglan's "kamla"
and "godzi", which differ only in that the x2 and x3 places are reversed:

	kamla = x1 comes from x2 to x3 via x4
	godzi = x1 goes to x2 from x3 via x4
	Lojban klama = x1 comes/goes to x2 from x3 via x4 by means x5

> Sia loa, hue Stiv Rais

In Lojban:  "ki'e co'o mi'e stiv. rais."  I assume "hue" is the self-
vocative; it does not appear in NB3 as a word valid before a name.

-- 
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban