Re: Chief logician?

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

RH>If Loglan or Lojban becomes a language really used, the decisions of
RH>an academy will become about as relevant as those of the Academy which
RH>imagines that it legislates for the French language, regardless of
RH>what any individual thinks. 

Agreed.  Buit JCB doesn't agree, and there's the rub in a society where he
controls all the strings.  In TLI society, if JCB and his academy don't
like how you use the language, his argument is that their copyrights and
(former) trademarks give them the right to control the usages made of the
language.  Indeed, *IF* TLI had kept the tardemark, they would not only
have had the right, they would have had the RESPONSIBILITY to police all
usages that were labelled 'Loglan'.

But we need not discuss politics if you do not wish to %^)

RH>A project which both languages should consider is the mechanization of
RH>not only the grammar of the language but of the allowed logical
RH>transformations; this would make it possible for interaction with
RH>machines to enforce the logical usages. 

I'm not competent to comment on the desireability or usefulness of this.
Others in the community can do better.

RH>It is far easier to
RH>learn to utter Loglan sentences which parse correctly than to learn
RH>the logical (and philosophical!) background knowledge needed to use
RH>the language(s) correctly.  

Hey - you've seen the level of argument in this current discussion.  We've
got people who seem to know how to dicuss these types of problems
intelligently, and for the most part independent of their knowledgfe of English.

But I think that MOST Lojban usage is relatively independent of the logical
problems.  People just do not make statements that involve quantifiactional
variables for the most part.  There is a nearly complete lack of the kind of 
universal statements made in English colloquial conversation, for example.
People use "le" with its intensional constraints, and that pretty much
eliminates this whole question of existence and sets and their membership
for those usages where "le" is acceptable.

I won;t say we are perfect, but we are doing pretty darn good.

An example - while we are now arguing about "need" (which I think is the
real problem in "I need a box", not the "a"), we HAVE tackled "seek", and
you no longer seek  objects that may exist - you seek property abstractions.

We have also dealt with raising of abstractions, a natlang phenomenon that is
endemic and invisible, and a serious logical and philosophical problem in
TLI Loglan.  WE have the solution, and people are using it with far more
sophistication and 'anturalness' than one might have thought.  

RH>My "feel" for both languages is that they are too
RH>similar to the native languages of the experimenters; see above.  If I
RH>were designing a language from scratch, I would have adopted VSO or
RH>even OSV word order (Polish or reverse Polish notation :-) ), for
RH>example.

Well, what is the native language of our 'experimenters'?  Yes, I am hopelessly
English-bound.  But the people who have been engaging you in the current
discussion include Jorge Llambias, who is Argentinian, and Veijo Vilva who
is
Finnish.  Nick Nicholas in Australia is bilingual-native Greek and English
and is the most fluent user of Lojban these days.  He is also skilled in
Klingon, which is as un-English as they come, and leads their philosophical
discussions as well as ours.  We are also starting to get input from Chines Lojbanists.

RH>I don't think that the scientific or non-scientific nature
RH>of JCB's method for contructing primitives, for example, is at all
RH>relevant to the usability of the language.

Agreed.  This is a 'marketing gimmick' in some ways.  But you need some 
non-random method of getting words that are different from native language
words, so that you can fight automatic transfer of semantics.  We seem to be
doing fairly well at that battle, though it takes eternal vigilance.
It does offer some possibliity of linguistics research into factors that
affect learnability of vocabularies, but this is really incidental to the
actual usability of the language for many of its purposes.

RH>Negation is fine in Loglan; except that I'm not sure I would have allowed
RH>negation of arguments; this has no analogue in symbolic logic usage
RH>and can lead to very misleading transformations. 

Please discuss handling of scalar vs. contradictory negation in TLI Loglan
sometime %^)    Then try handling metalinguistic negation  (for thatmatter try doing
much of anything metalinguistic in TLI Loglan).

RH>Lojban community realize that logical connectives applied to arguments
RH>produce problems of scope (usually handled implicitly in NL's)
RH>precisely analogous to those connected with quantification?
RH>
RH>Consider
RH>
RH>John and James love Mary or Sally
RH>                                   
RH>versus
RH>
RH>Mary or Sally is loved by John and James
RH>
RH>In the second sentence, but not in the first, it is clear that John
RH>and James love the same unspecified element of {Mary, Sally}; in the
RH>first sentence, they may love different elements of the set.   

These sentences in LOjban will expand into a series of sentences that are
logically connected.  Negation may require use of DeMorgan's Law.  The
Lojban negations should cause few problems.

We do not have logical negation of arguments though - we have contrary
negation (this is my off-the cuff recollection).  You can talk about
going to 'other-than Rome'.  If my recollection is incorrect, though,
we still have dealt with the questions and come up with answers which are
not the natlang answers.

lojbab