Re: TECH: new cmavo "ju'e"

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

Thanks for not taking my somewhat angry rejoinder personally.

But I am going to have to invoke whatever authority I hold as "chief designer"
on this matter.

The less emotional basis that I SHOULD have made clear is:

The LOjban grammar is baselined.  AS such, we are required to resist
unnecessary change, and as much as possible make whatever changes we are
forced to make have a minimum effect on the language.

The standard has generally been "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The
experimental part of the grammar design ended when we baselined, and we are
NOT going to add new experiments just because someone thinks they would be
useful.

Broken generally means that there is a definite logical flaw, or we find that
there is something from the natural language that one cannot say at all.
Aesthetic flaws are not covered, because aesthetics "has a standards place"
it is subjective to individuals.

Cowan has a little more flexibility than the rest of us on proposing grammar
changes since he is writing the reference grammar.  "Hard to describe" is in
my book "broken", because of the need for the reference grammar to be an
ultimate standard for the language.  I am also sensitive toproblems in
teaching the language since I've been stuck with that job more than once %^).

The limiting case at the moment on what constitutes an appropriate change
is a proposal Veijo made last year to improve preposed relative cluases.
The existing language design forces "center embedding" when these are
nested, and that can be seen as "broken".  I cannot easily evaluate the
proposal, since I don't use presposed relatives - the importance of an
issue like this is much different for a native speaker of a natlang with
preposed relatives.  But even this change is not a "sure thing".  Cowan
has not even turned it into a formal proposal yet.

As to the stag-bo vs connective+stag-bo, minimal change requires us to use
the latter form, as does consistency, because that form IS allowed.  By
recoignizing this, "ju'e" suddenly gets elevated to the next rank of
importance "logical flaw", because we do NOT have a way of explicitly saying
"connected- but the nature of the connection is not specified" except at
the sentence level with ".i"  My personal standard of using ".e/je/gi'e"
is logically flawed in that some will take it to mean a logical conjunction,
even though my practice had been to ignore the conncective when followed
by a modal.  Cowan has convinced me (and Nora) that one cannot always ignore
the connective - there are times when it is important.   So ju'e, which
requires no grammar change is baseline-preserving minimal change.  To the
extent it solves other problems that have not been raised, all the better.

Jorge's X1 and X2 are more difficult to evaluiate, since it is hard to say
that there is something broken - we specifically did NOT try to make the
language able to express all scopes in afterthought that could possibly
e resolvable in forethought.  So whether to change in order to allow these
will come down largely to Cowan's worthy opinion for how easy/hard it makes
it to explain the grammar with.without the changes.  The fact that the
changes are simple expansions of the langauge and cannot possibly eliminate
any past usage is in their favor,  Thge fact that Jorge solved the problems
for GIhEks and not for GUhEks (jargon alert for Chris's FAQ - look also at
other grammar non-terminals that get widely used in list discussions), makes
the proposal seem incomplete.

The change to JE grammar is trying to fix what isn;t broken, and in my opinion
breaking something to boot.  Likewise Jorge's new X5, which has the added
burden of restricting a currently possible usage.

But the bottom line is that I cannot see justification for fiddling with ANY
of this part of the grammar due to baseline considerations.

Faced further wityh deadline pressure to get books done, I am especially
unwilling to bend right now - we have lost much of the last year because
Cowan and I were uncertain whether the LO/LE/any discussion with all
of its funky scope issues was going to blossom into a grammar change with
lots of "broken" consequences.

A loto of this is judgement calls, and I feel that I have the responsibility
and the authority to make those judgement calls.  That is my "Lojban Central"
role - oitherwise my voice is no more than first among equals, and even there
it is largely because on any significant issue, I have Nora here making my
"pronouncements" on behalf of two instead of one.

I apologize to Jorge because I think I was a little clumsier and less direct
 than I was in respondingf to Mark Vines' proposal. But I think also that I had
presumed that Jorge understood that we are extremely resistant to all sorts of
changes - he has been told "no" a lot more than "yes" to his ideas, not all of
which would be bad if we were starting fresh (and No I am not going to say
which, since I don't know).

At least Mark needn't feel alone as a rejected proposer, and Jorge is anything
but a newcomer.  And Jorge is getting ONE change made tot eh language albeit
a much more minor one of a new cmavo.  Though Cowan still has yet to weigh in
on X1 and X2.

lojbab