HISTORY: Some recent JCB pronouncements on Loglan

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

In weeding through my mail files, I found 2 postings by JCB on the Loglanist
list that appeared and shortly thereafter seems to have disappeared.  (Anyone
know what happened to it???)  They give historical viewpoints on topics that
have come up in Lojban List discussions, and which therefore may be of interest
to the masses.  I forward the messages in their entirety, without translation
of the TLI Loglan to Lojban equivalents.  However, I will note that his
"lo" is our "loi/lei" distinction, with a heavier bearing on "loi", and his
"da" series is in Lojban split up into "ri/ra/ru" and the "ko'a series", and
the "vo'a" series and a couple of other things.

lojbab
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Message  5:
Date: 28 Aug 92 02:02:31 EDT
From: James Cooke Brown <70674.1434@CompuServe.COM>
To: Logli <loglanists@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: Gary on "Waiting for a Taxi"

Hoi Logli, kae:

This is in response to Gary's ideas about "waiting for a taxi."  One can
indeed say 'Mi na pazda ne taksi' = 'I am waiting for exactly one taxi'
or 'Mi na pazda su taksi' = 'I am waiting for at least one taxi'; but I
don't think either of these forms is the "best", in the sense of "most
loglandical", usage for conveying what is happening when one is waiting
for a taxi.  Why not?  Because it emphasizes the denumerability property
of taxis and this is not what is involved in waiting for one.

What IS involved can perhaps only be seen from the perspective of those
(mostly preliterate) peoples (like the Trobrianders), who use the mass
designation almost exclusively in their languages.  (Look at Dorothy
Lee, on this topic; or even Quine.  There's even an article by me of
"The Creatures of Lo" in one of the early TL's.)  For these people,
there are no importantly separate manifestations of ANYTHING.  As I say
in L1, each baby to a Trobriander is simply a manifestation of "Mr.
Baby", each yam, an appearance of "Mr.  Yam" all over again.  Everything
is a manifestation of some mass individual:  water of the mass of all
the water there is, a yam of all the yams there are, a book of all the
books there are, and so on.  It is COUNTING that is awkward and odd in
such languages.  Invariably they use a special enumerator, like
"one-piece yam", "one-piece baby", "one-piece book", when they want to
treat these objects as separate, countable things.

Now, L is not Trobriand.  But L is neutral on this matter of
manifestation versus denumerability...well; not quite; the unmodified L
preda is indeed denumerable.  But L does have a 'lo' operator that
allows you to talk in a Trobriand way should you wish to.  It allows all
of us to use this mysteriously shadowy conception of the mass individual
standing behind each manifestation of itself when it is semantically
appropriate for us to do so.

Now we come to a matter of personal judgement.  Having played this eerie
game for some years, I am persoanlly convinced that that is exactly what
I am doing when I am waiting for "a taxi"...or going to "the
movies"...or liking "icecream"...or enjoying the company of "women".  I
am waiting for, going to, liking, and enjoying the company of,
respectively, some manifestation in my experience of all the taxis there
are, all the movies there are, all the icecream there is, all the women
there have ever been.  In fact, that is PRECISELY what I am doing when I
am waiting for a taxi!  I am waiting for an appearance out of the mist
of this mass individual.  And interestingly enough neither 'Mi na pazda
ne taksi' nor 'Mi na pazda su taksi'--and certainly not 'Mi na pazda le
taksi' unless I called one!--gives anything like the right spin on my
meaning.  For at the moment, when I am actually waiting for one, I am
totally uninterested in the fact that taxis can, under other
circumstances, be lined up in ranks and be counted.

What I am waiting for IS an appearance, a manifestation, of something
much much larger than the particular taxi that eventually does bear down
on me.

So, I at least will pazda lo taksi, godzi lo sinma, and gaispe lopo mi
kinci lo fumna whenever I am in Loglandia...and in true Trobriand
fashion, I will not count a single one of them, or even regard them as
very separate from one another.

It is, in short, a question of mood, of how one means to enjoy--or at
least experience--the world.  Trobrianders do it one way; counters do it
another way; we logli ought to be able to do it both ways.  Which way
are you going to do it when you are waiting for a taxi?  Or enjoying the
company of women?

Hue Djim Braon

=======================
Message  4:
Date: 28 Aug 92 02:02:47 EDT
From: James Cooke Brown <70674.1434@CompuServe.COM>
To: Logli <loglanists@ucsd.edu>
Subject: Re: James on "LIFO Proarguments"

Hoi Logli, kae:

In response to James's speculation about how LIFO got adopted for
variable assignment, here is an "archival note" for those who collect
such things.  Let me first repeat James's quite reasonable-sounding
speculation so we know what we're talking about:

<<[T]he theory [probably] was that da assignment is hard because
sentences are long, so we'll make it easy to assign things to what is
nearby.>>

Nope.  "The theory was" that assigning and recovering the assignments of
replacing variables to their current replaceands (the things that these
variables replace) was in many ways analogous to the storage and
recovery of the not-yet-acted-on elements by an utterance-generating
"machine", and in the model I felt at the time was most likely to be
true (the Yngvean "depth" model; see the 1961 reference in L1) these
elements were saved in a LIFO store or "stack".  That is, you stuffed
these unacted-on elements into your "intermediate memory" on top of one
another and then dealt with the last one in until all were out.  I
thought designation-replacement might work in the same way.  This was a
hunch, not a theory.

Well, we know a lot more about memory and a little more about
speech-generation than we did then, and while the Yngve model is still a
lively one, it obviously does not work for designation-repalcement...or,
if it does, the number of elements in the stack cannot be as many as
five.  MUCH experience with the 'da'-series on the part of generations
of perfectly compliant logli attests to that sad fact.

It is this that has caused me to think that attempting to make and then
remember ANY pattern of ARBITRARY replacements is hopeless.  So we are
looking for something unarbirary these days.  And I think that in
replacement by initial letter we have probably found it.

That's all I have to say on this matter today...except that there is
obviously a role to be played by the presently unemployed 'da'-series,
too.  Let us find it.

Hue Djim Braon