Re: from the paper archives - pc on abstractors and tense

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>All of which is to say that while my admiration for lojban is tinged
>with more adverse attitudes, my admiration for Lojbab and his fellow
>workers is pure and complete. If to some extent my criticisms may be
>felt to be rhetorically directed at Lojbab, they are directed at
>him only qua defender of the feature in question, not qua its inventor.
  Understood, and I am not offended (nor have been).

However, there are times when I wish that you would allow me to put down the
mantle of defense/expalantion and go write the dictionary.  With the never
ending series of change proposals, that indeed gets resurrected every time
we get a new "seething rationalist", I spend far too much time defending
"issues", and making sure that none of them TRULY mean something is fatally
wrong, and too little time dealing with the rest of the community (backed up
orders) and writing books.  This is BAD, and I have tried many times to
break myself of the defensive habit.  But seething rationalists are the ones
most likely to provoke schism, and while I'm not that much afraid that any
schism would work, I am all too familiar with what happened when JCB ran
into a idealist who in turn found a few seething rationalists to help
him reinvent JCB's language.

BTW, I would not say that I singlehandedly invented large portions of Lojban
grammar.  I usually was the one who proposed the paradigm, but pc, Nora
and I often went around for hours on the telephone working out the details,
and then we YACCed things and discussed some more.  The total discussion
that went into some of the decisions almost certainly exceeds even that
spent in the last year on the any/lo/quantifiers clump of issues.

Though I have to admit that I think we were more setthing pragmatists than
seething rationalists.  The idea was to recoup as much of JCB's work,
hammered by 30 years of review by seething whatevers, and flesh out the
design based on some of the issues raised but never resolved.  For example
"li'i" was proposed by a paraplegic to JCB several years before Lojban
was started, but JCB never even responded to the proposal.

lojbab