Re: response to Dave Matuszek

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    (This thread about linguistics, the definitions of language,
creole, pidgin, & code has gone on too long, that is to say it
has gone on long enough to provoke me to flame away.  and what
is worse is this is a very negative flame.)

    Lojbab says:
> If the language is going to ever have practical application
> (i.e. if it is ever to be a real langauge), we have to sell
> the language to one of the three 1) an international language
> community 2) the artificial intelligence natural language
> processing community 3) the linguistic communtiy.
>
> 1) is downplayed so as to avoid competing with Esperanto.
> 2&3 are highly interdependent in that many NLP people are
> trained as linguists.

So what we have here is the recognition that Logical Languages
are doomed!
    I expect that logical languages will not be accepted by the
linguistic community for 100's of years.  They are afraid of
working with anything that is well defined!  That is the need for
their claim that, by definition, the grammar of a human language
is only really defined within the individual humans.  This is
why they distance themselves from the work of mathematicians and
computer scientists, like formal grammar work.  

But Lojbab further shows the faults in their position when he
tries to use the distinction "between objective and subjective
meaning." In Lojban, we determine meanings subjectively because
we cannot determine them objectively.  We look up the gismu in our
lists, find a phrase that describes the relation, the phrase is
in English, and the meaning is subjective because English is a
Language!
    I routinely "correct" people on their use of language, citing
definitions from dictionaries and rules of grammar from text books.
I don't know of many people who are willing to allow great latitude
in the use of language.  Most people will shun anyone who tries to
introduce even one new or uncommon word a day, let alone someone who 
actively exercises their "right" to define the language.
    While the introduction of new words has continued (and maybe
even accelerated), other aspects of English have become much more
rigid over the last 400 years.  No new letters have been added, no
letters have been dropped, spellings have standardized, grammar
has been codified.  Most of this stability I ascribe to literacy
and printed reference books.  (This stability even caused
idiosyncrasies of printing to be frozen without concern for their
impact, like which letter combinations form ligatures (in
German one ligature became an additional letter, the eszed),
but the flexibility of modern electronic typesetting has not
thawed the arbitrary standards only emphasized those standards.)


(Lojbab, you talk too much.  Your presentation of position stood
as well as it could possibly stand.  Your clarification only undermine
it.)

> But if we talk in a code - say pig latin - to be rudimentary, we do not
> undersatnd the words as having meanings in themselves - we do not
> "attribute" meanings to words.  Instead we just assign the English
> equivalent of each pig-laitin word, and then 'undersatnd' the English.

Then anybody who properly learns lojban (the concept) will never
be talking in code.  There is no mapping from lojban to English.
The structure of what is communicated is fundementally different.
English words can not be substituted in from their lojban "counterparts",
and have the result be understandable English.  Whenever I did
something like that I had transliterated lojban; it retained most
if not all of its lojban(loglan) quality.


    As to the issue of lujvo, I am sick and tired of not having
a reference for the collected ahd anotated lujvo.  PLEASE SEND
ME ANY WORDS THAT YOU CONSTRUCT.  I will try to organize them.
If I get any set of non trivial size (>100) I will regularly
include a comment about how many I have and will answer requests
for copies.

    thank you all,
    Arthur


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.