Re: your mail

[cowan (John Cowan)]

la stiv. rais. cusku di'e:
> (I really would
> appreciate being pulled from the general list)

Done.  It is customary in the electronic mail community to send such requests
to the administrative address.

>      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.

This "continuity" is a matter of the prim vocabulary alone.  Even so basic
a cmavo as "la" did not appear in 1960, to say nothing of "lo" (Lojban
"loi").

> [W]hile 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.

Oddly, indefinite quantification was already present in 1960; apparently it
was then "lost" and did not resurface for 20-odd years.  Note the following
table:

1960		NB3		Lojban		English
ni mreni	ni mrenu	no nanmu	no men
ne mreni	ne mrenu	pa nanmu	a man, one man
ra mreni	ra mrenu	ro nanmu	all men

All the 1960 examples actually appear in the >Scientific American< article.

> In sum, morphology aside, the difference isn't
> extreme.  And even morphologically, most of the changes have been
> additive.

95% of the words in Loglan 4/5 are obsolete.  This is "mere additive change"?
JCB is still selling this work, I believe, as if it represented something
useful to loglypli.

>      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.

They >are< Loglan's, because Lojban is 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.)

If Lojban were an independent language, it would have failed in its goals.
The formal name of the language is "Lojban - A Realization of Loglan".
Whether it counts as a "separate language" is of course a political question;
the reasons why French and Italian are "separate languages" whereas Wu and
Gan aren't are clearly cultural/historical/political and not linguistic.

>      Does Loglan's evolution mean that the name has become generic?
> No; at least not in the sense lojbab has tried for.  Consider:

[much sarcasm and references to commercial trademarks deleted]

TLI claims that "Loglan" is a trademark for certain grammars and dictionaries;
the U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, however, found >on the basis of
JCB's own submissions< that

	LOGLAN, being a generic term, does not function as a trademark
	for respondent's [TLI's] goods.

Most of LLG's submissions did not even seem to be a factor in the Board's
decision; JCB destroyed his own case.

>      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?

The term "rip them off" implies that the phonology, morphology, and grammar
(hardly a "few odds and ends" by any measure) are the personal property of
JCB.  This is precisely the point at issue.  The position of the logli
who founded LLG is that a language belongs to its users.

Please remember >why< LLG had to remake the vocabulary.  JCB claimed and
still claims that >EVERY TEXT< written in Loglan without his consent
infringes his copyright (now transferred to TLI) on the words of the language.
In other words, nothing can be published in Loglan except what JCB,
as language owner, is pleased to permit.  The chilling effect on free
expression using the language (to say nothing of >about< the language) should
be obvious.

Such a claim is almost certainly unenforceable under U.S. copyright law;
however, LLG chose to remake the words in order to forestall a useless,
financially draining, and emotionally divisive court fight.  In the end,
the legal battle came anyway in a different venue.  So much the worse for
all of us.

> 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?

LLG had no interest in "inventing a new language".  Bob LeChevalier has stated
publicly on many occasions his view that no one person can "invent" a
language from whole cloth, not even JCB.  Although his contribution to 
Loglan (including Lojban) is larger than that of any other single individual,
it is >not< larger than that of every other logli combined.

>      (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.)

Two language owners negotiating over the scope of your sovereign rights
to various language features.  How impressive.

>     Brown came up with the idea [of predicate languages], so
>     I'm not going to rip off his (and others') work.

I'm glad you acknowledge the fact that others have contributed to Loglan.

>     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.

Others have thought as you did.  The history of those who have worked with
JCB for extended periods (which does >not< include myself: I have no personal
animus here) clearly indicates whose ego is paramount.

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