Re: Lujvo paper

[Nick Nicholas <nnich@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr>]

Dear John,

I am, if anything, touched by your concern about how I'd take the news.
But you need not fear on that account: the point of our work, after all,
is the collective good of Lojban, and not my personal renown. So you
have my blessings to proceed with a cannibalising of the paper for
the grammar as you see fit, given the appropriate credits (since the
status does seem comparable to that for the negation paper.) I can only
express my regret that I'm forcing more work on you.

A couple of comments: do you think Chapter 3 is really the right place
for this paper, however simplified? Given the provisional nature of
its conclusions, and its dependence on predicate concepts, I would
have thought the end of the grammar, if anywhere, was an appropriate
place.

I know this is going to come out as sour grapes given that I'm saying
it now, but it is an honest criticism: the negation paper is exceedingly
hard to follow. (Well, I suppose "hard to follow as well" is more
appropriate :-) . Part of the problem is probably similar to that in
my own: a lot of preliminary theory in the beginning, with terminology
that doesn't always help ('contrary' and 'contradictory' are too close
for comfort), insufficient examples, and way too long in general. I
hesitated to write you this, though, because I didn't have any constructive
plans for improving the paper that wouldn't increase its length
insufferably. I may give it some thought over the Christmas break, although
I must say, my window of free time for extracirricular activities is
shutting fast. (My last log in for the year is Dec. 21, and I'm not
quite sure how much access I'll have to the net from Salonica January.)

Please do not feel you're driving me away from Lojban. Since the thought
has occured to you, I must be honest to you, in a way I may perhaps have
avoided doing with Lojbab: Lojban is a language that needs a lot of
work, and a lot of knowledge of formal semantics, to be done properly.
I would not feel I was doing justice to the language, now that I've had
a cursory look at Montague grammar, if I didn't go back and learn it
backwards. The problem is, I don't have the time now, and I won't have
the time in the foreseeable future, and formal semantics is not the
direction my research is taking me in. So I honestly don't know *when*
I will become a properly active Lojbanist again (in the way you or
Jorge are).

And yet, at the same time, I owe the world to you people. I became a
linguist because of you --- something I noted in the introduction to
my Master's thesis (in Klingon, and that, of course, is significant...)
I think the language is really doing work that noone else is doing,
and can teach us a lot. Of course, if I *was* a formal semanticist, I'd
be much more certain about how much Lojban is really teaching us, and
how much it isn't.

The whole matter of my decreased Lojban involvement is complicated by
my increased involvement with Klingon. There may be a perception out there
that I've defected to Klingon; I must admit, the facts seem to bear it out,
and both Mark (who's done likewise) and I feel terrible about it. It was
borne out in the discussion we had with Lojbab last year (you may have
been cc'd it). Indeed, and please don't tell Lojbab this --- Ivan has
followed suite, and quite simply doesn't have the heart to tell Lojbab
so. (Although Ivan's main AL involvement remains Tolkien languages.
Actually, Ivan learned Klingon just from using my translation of Much
Ado as a Rosetta stone, without any grammatical or lexical knowledge;
I'm sure there's a book in that story!)

I'm not going to go into a relative valuation between Klingon and Lojban,
because that isn't the point. The fact is, it *is* possible to write
a metrical, rhyming Hamlet of sorts in Klingon, for all its attendant
simplifications and distortions --- and I don't think it is, yet, in
Lojban. There's a much steeper... not learning curve, but you know,
we have to struggle to get even simple prose out. And of course this is
to Lojban's credit, because it gets implemented as a language from the
ground up, and doesn't just get creolised into place like Esperanto.
(Although, to be fair to the Klingonists, good Klingon (as opposed to
Glen Proechel's abortions) is not just translated English; there's
some definite innovations taking part there. It's just that Klingonists
don't have to know about veridicality, say, in a language with no
articles...) But it does make it easy to get discouraged about Lojban,
particularly when the discussions on the list get so numerous and dense.

I don't know what the conclusion is. It's not appropriate for me to
wallow in my guilt; but the fact is that I do have that measure of
guilt about how things have turned out, on the one hand, and on the
other I don't think I can do anything much about it any time soon. (On
the 'plus' side, it's not like I've been active on Klingon List for the
past year either...) So that's where I stand. I've not been driven away;
but I am dormant, and probably will be for a while. Though I must say,
it was wonderful to get in contact with the Lojbanists in the UK; if
only I could have more regular personal contact with them, we could do
great things... *sigh* Oh well.

The mechanical problems you mention are a couple of days work; well,
some of them, anyway. But like you say, cannibalising the paper seems a
preferable course of action.

If you don't put the lujvo paper in the Appendix (which would enlarge
the grammar, possible unnecessarily), perhaps the paper could be made
available as a separate publication. One way or another, it will be
available on the FTP site, won't it? So no big deal.

Full steam ahead, then, I suppose; and again, congratulations on such
a thorough and well-written opus!


-- 
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne. In Greece until Feb. '96.
            Normally:     nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au
     TEMPORARILY (until end of '95): nnich@leon.nrcps.ariadne-t.gr