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     Here we go again.  A response to a response to my response to
some responses to some questions I asked.  At least no one can say
I'm irresponsible.  To keep my mailbox under control (I really would
appreciate being pulled from the general list), I've been deleting
messages more than usual, and I must admit that I accidentally pruned
Cowan's response to my response (etc; I'm not going through all that
again) from my mailbox; would you mind re-sending it?  (I know:
Naughty, naughty.  Here, I'll hold out my wrists for you to slap.)

     Missed your chance, didn't you?

     To begin with, I should point out that the "Group Lojban" bit
was a once-only illustration, not a running gag.  To keep it up would
be petty and boorish, and I prefer to leave those qualities to the
experts.

     Anyhoo, Cowan lists about five or six different versions of
Loglan and seems to think this justifies something.  Constructed
languages evolve quite rapidly, however; it's common for one to
undergo a couple centuries' worth of change in a decade.  By this
standard, Loglan's development isn't unusual.  Compare praesperanto
to the modern kind some day.  For that matter, I'd say there are two
stages of Loglan:  pre- and post- Great Morphological Revision.  (In
a sense, I suppose the in-between phase should also count, but I
don't think there's much of a corpus for it.)  But although the
differences between pre- and post-GMR Loglan seem enormous, in some
ways I doubt they're much greater than those between Middle and
Modern English, and any reasonably educated English-speaker should be
able to muddle through a Middle English text.

     In any event, there is definite continuity from the Loglan of
the Scientific American article to that described in the fourth
edition of Loglan 1.  Such continuity cannot reasonably be claimed
for Lojban.  The lexical continuity for Loglan is great at the
primitive level, which is where an historical linguist would look
first.  The complex vocabulary has changed by about one phoneme per
morpheme--higher than the amount of change from Middle to Modern
English, perhaps, but still not too great.  Even the phonology is
largely the same.  And for that matter, the while the grammar has
changed, most of the changes have been additive and thus pose no
problem.  Other grammatical shifts, especially indefinite
quantification, may be considered outworkings of normal tensions
within the grammar.  In sum, morphology aside, the difference isn't
extreme.  And even morphologically, most of the changes have been
additive.

     (I should mention that I was reasonably familiar with the '68
and '75 editions when I made the sudden jump to Modern Loglan.  I was
somewhat puzzled at first, but adapted to the changes inside of a
month--including the vocabulary, for the most part.  On the other
hand, I think picking up Lojban would take rather longer, because
it's much further from the original, and not in helpful ways.)

     In Lojban, on the other hand, the difference is almost total.
On historical principles, the Loglan of the fourth edition of L1 is
clearly--and closely-- related to that of the SA article.  Lojban is
harder to explain in terms of historical linguistics.  Its
vocabulary, as noted, is not generally related to Loglan's.  The
underlying structures have quite as clearly been copied from Loglan.
So it's not a form of Loglan in the way that post-GMR Loglan is a
form of Loglan or in the way that Modern English is a form of Middle
English.  Conclusion:  there is no warrant to call Lojban "a Loglan",
though there is enough evidence, in my view, to consider it a
knock-off of Loglan.  (This point surprised me.  When I first started
looking into Lojban, I thought it might be an independent language.
No such luck.)

     Does Loglan's evolution mean that the name has become generic?
No; at least not in the sense lojbab has tried for.  Consider:
WordPerfect (a trademark of WordPerfect Corp.) has gone through five
versions and who knows how many minor changes.  Does this mean that
you could get away with copying version 4.0, making a few minor
changes, writing your own docs for it, and releasing it as "a
WordPerfect"?  Try it and see.

     But let's forget about reality and its inconveniences for a
moment, and assume that one could legitimately talk about "a Loglan".
Would it make any difference?  Not a bit!

     Ford Motor Co. has been in business since about 1903.  Over the
past almost ninety years, it's turned out a few different makes and
models of Ford.  You actually can speak of "a Ford [car/truck]".
(Despite this fact, "Ford" is a registered trademark, I believe.)
Again, what would happen if you took the design of a '87 Ford, added
and subtracted a few features ("Fuzzy dice and no seatbelts
standard!"), made a cosmetic change or two ("Chartreuse with pink
trim!"), and tried peddling the result as "a Ford"?  The company
lawyers would greet you with open (and heavily befanged) mouths!
(Can you say "feeding frenzy"?  I knew you could!)

     The disturbing part of all this is that it's so unnecessary.
The features copied from Loglan were not divinely inspired.  The
five-letter primitive predicates, the forms of several of the cmavo,
and a few other odds and ends are distinctive features of Loglan.
Why rip them off?  I have a predlang under way myself.  (By the way,
-gua!spi is a predlang; under the tentative classification I'm
working out, Loglan and Lojban are "Classical Predlangs", while
-gua!spi and my own project are "Modern".)  Anyway, in my predlang,
as in -gua!spi, none of the features mentioned can be found.  See
what a little creativity can do?

     (You might be interested to know that Brown is well aware of my
project; I told him about it before I made any contributions to
Loglan, because some of the things I suggested were implemented first
in my own system.  His response:  That's OK, just don't go borrowing
Loglan words.  (I have his signed statement to that effect.)  That
didn't bother me, because my system's morphology differs radically
from Loglan's.)

     I've decided not to release my system on an unsuspecting world
until after the experiments with Loglan have been carried out.  Why?

1.  Professional etiquette.  Put another way, thou shalt not horn in
    on someone else's experiment.  Brown came up with the idea, so
    I'm not going to rip off his (and others') work.

2.  Professional interest.  One of my major goals is to find out
    whether Whorf knew what he was talking about.  (There are other
    linguistic experiments involved as well.)  So I'm going to put my
    ego on hold and work with the already-existing experiment.  If I
    put my ego first, the experiment probably won't be concluded in
    my lifetime.

3.  Simple pragmatism.  I don't even know whether all this will work.
    So before I go setting up an organization of my own, I'll wait
    for the results of the Loglan experiment.  Besides, the question
    is not "Is it perfect?"  Loglan isn't perfect, though I suspect
    it's better than Lojban, and I'm quite sure that my project could
    run rings around them both.  The question is "Is it good enough
    to achieve its goals?"  And I conclude that Loglan is that good.

     If you're really serious about the experiment, give your ego a
rest and pitch in!  One of the reasons Esperanto isn't the global
second language is that a bunch of wise-acres kept distracting people
with "new and improved" versions (which soon sputtered and died).
Esperanto does have problems, but it's clearly good enough to achieve
its goals.  The solution is not to go off and create your own
"perfect" system, but to work with what is already there.

Ea mu daspa bivdu!, hue la Stiv