Re: GLI Re: What the *%$@ does "nu" mean?

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

>Again I think you're responding to the wrong point. While the
>philopsophy of perception is interesting, the relevant point
>remains the distinction between concrete and abstract entities.
>Even if you believe that viska, or zgana, or whatever can have
>an abstract percept sumti, the fact remains that any te sumti
>that must be concrete cannot be a nu, if a nu is an event-type.

Ah, but Lojban does not prescribe that there is inherently a concrete/
abstract dichotomy in indivdual te sumti.  I may not know what it means
to say "li mu cu djuno" or "le nu klama" cu jubme" But this is "just semantics"
and Lojban for the most part eschews the prescription of semantics
(at least partially because the only way we have to talk about semantics is
in terms of English which has its own semantics assumptions).

>> >There was a long thread on this a month or two ago, which I did
>> >not participate in.
>>
>> And which like all  the rest petered out after much volume with no
>> resolution and obviously just as much confusion among at least as
>> many people as when we started.
>
>I'm not sure that anyone except you remains confused.

I'm not sure that more than half a dozen people even read the posts, as
indeed I think is usually the case in these hypertechnical discussions.

>The debate was resolved. It became clear that ni and jei have
>contradictory definitions. Chris is probably right that we must
>conclude that ni and jei are homonymous.

I do not see how this can be even plausible, since ni is open-ended and
jei is close-ended.

>> Yet I have yet to see a Lojban statement using jei that I did not
>> understand.
>--More--
>
>I don't see what understandability has got to do with it.

Since Lojban semantics is largely undefined, understandability is everything.

>If
>I see that what you say is, taken literally, nonsense, but I
>am sure you're trying to talk sense, then naturally I look
>around to find the sense you are likeliest to be intending.
>Or I may not even notice that what you say is nonsense, and may
>immediately come up with a sensical interpretation.

Hopefully you will do this by negotiation of the pragmatics, until a Lojbanic
semantics is built up from a body of usage.

>For simple mastery of the language, Jorge is certainly the
>authority of authorities.

I contend (and suspect that Jorge would agree) that Nick remains supreme
due to relative fluency.  Given open-ended amounts of time, I think there are
several people including myself who are as competent as Jorge.  But most of the
rest of us don't have that time.

> But when it comes to saying what is and
>is not Lojban, you are the leader.

Not no more.

>For example, you have recently
>been emphatically and without hedges stating what Lojban is, and
>what criteria will define it.

I am interpreting what the prescription is intended to cover (and in
general I will err on overcoverage to protect the language.  I do not
have any greater authority than anyone else to interpret the refgrammar
itself (I may have useful history that can give me credibility, butthen Cowan
can usually trump me on that since he tends to remember history more
accurately than I do).  And my basis for making such interpretations as         I DO
 make must remain in temrs of previous statements made before the baseline.
The ULTIMATE basis for "what is Lojban" is JCB's writing in the beginning of
L1, and in Scientific American as to what the language is intended to be.
We deposed JCB as the ultimate authoirty in the Loglan Project, but that did
not invlaidate his pronouncements from before said deposition.

>> And when you talk about Montague semantics, I claim no authoirty at all.
>
>If I talk about Montague Semantics I don't realize I'm doing so.

That was an example.  If you talk in anyattempt to logically analyze semantics
of a language that has minimal prescription of its semantics, as opposed
to the pragmatics that will determine the semantics, then you are going
outside of my area, and probably outside of anything the Lojban prescription
is intended to be.

>> I contend that the discussions we are having now are NOT established
>> conventions.  That is why we are arguing.  That which is stated in the
>> refgrammar is presription.  That which is stated inthe dictionary is
>> prescription.  That which is to be stated in the textbook is prescription
>> (though the authority of the latter will be considerably proscribed by the
>> prior two works).
>
>Without the ref grammar before me, I can't cite chapter and verse,
>and moreover the refgrammar tends to be somewhat informal and
>pedagogical than precise.

And the textbook will be even more so.  The dictionary will be formal only
in the sense that brevity requires a high degree of conventionality.

>Anyway, there are certain established but possibly unwritten
>conventions, such as the absence of homonymy in Lojban.

I am unsure by this wehether you mean polysemy of an individual word
or two words sharing a single meaning.

If you mean an absence of polysemy, then I would say that there is no such
principle regaridng the structure words of Lojban (as opposed to content
words), and indeed we have several cmavo which are explicitly polysemous
if analogical in some way in various grammatical contexts.  "nai" being
one of the most obvious.

I think that we have tried to MINIMIZE polysemy except where it is implicitly
marked by differences in grammar.  But I don't think we have enough of a
theory of Lojban semantics to eliminate polysemy, if indeed it is even possible
in human language.

>> ALL postbaseline discussions purporting to clarify and/or interpret the
>> baseline documents, above and beyond trivialities like typo corrections if
>> some are found necessary are de jure nonprescriptive.
>
>I don't understand what "de jure" means here.

de jure meaningthat by the establishment of the baseline, which WAS a de jure
(i.e. official) act, we have committed that acts after said baseline will
NOT have official standing.

>> My arguments with
>> Ashley are based to a limited extent on baseline documents, andto a less
>> liited extent on pre-baseline statements of intent.  They have less force th
>> the baseline documents, but some force as statements of intent,
>
>This is one source of your authority: since it was your intent,
>you can made statements of it.

That may be so, but 1 refgrammar trumps my intent whenever they disagree,
as in the case of the quantifier on le'i in a recent post.  My intent is
not
prescriptive except in areas not covered by the refgrammar, and even then
it is largely tempered by my actual statements in the past.

>We have set no policy on what the riole of myself and
>--More--
>> anyone else who serves as an LLG editor of Lojban text will have as a
>> prescriptive force (i.e. what kinds of errors we can/will reject) but I hope
>> my role will be no greater than any other person who copuld speak the langua
>> as well as me.
>
>How do you judge how well someone can speak L?

I would be hard pressed to come up with a short answer to that especially since
I have not done much LOjban judging myself in recent months.

I suspect that it has to do with how often they make 1) overt errors of
grammar or word choice (including mastery of the gismu list) - and especially
the basics since I don't expec that anyone has a parser built into their
brain yet for complex grammar 2) successfully communicate with other
Lojban speakers who can comment intelligently on what they have read/heard
without a lot of negotiation  in either Lojban or English 3) successfully
understand and still manage to detect and correct errors of others.

>> I am perhaps a little harsher towards Ashley because, whereas you have
>> written texts in the language and more or less successfully communicated in
>> the language, you have some credibility as a Lojban speaker.
>
>You repeatedly apply this criterion. It seems to be little more
>than some kind of initiation rite; a sign of insiderhood.

yes it is.  Until you use the language, you have nothing at stake and little
reason to empathize with those others who have used and are using the language.
We know that those who have used tha language or who have attempted to learn
the language in the past have a different mindset towards the language itself,
and towards the possibility of change in the language, and towards authority
over the language than do those who have not yet made some overt commitment.
I think this similarly reflects the attitudes of native speakers of human
languages to "reform efforts" as well as the resistance of Esperantists to
those who would change THAT language.

The reason we separated from JCB was that we felt that the language had to be
in the hands of its users, and not an authoirty that felt that it "owned" the
language/  Since that set of users is open-ended over time, this means that
the language must be in the public domain.  Secondarily, there has been
long standing on-record statements from many people that they would not
learn a language that was changing as they tried to learn it.  Context made
clear that this did not refere to the natural change in languages by
evolution of usage, but rather directed change by prescription.  The success
of the language in reaching suich people requres tyhat prescription enter
its ba'o phase.

>The quality of my writing about Lojban has not been improved by my
>writing in Lojban, and the sensible things Ashley has been saying
>are not any the less sensible for his not having posted
>texts in Lojban.

I disagree with reagrd to your Lojban postings, but quality presumably is
subkjective.  The types of "errors" that get discussed in these messages
I consider to be quite incidental to quality of Lojban usage among the present
set of speakers.  When we have a few hundred speakers who have used the language
and who established the types of things discussed in these polemics through
extensive usage sahred by all of them, then a user who fails to follow one
of them THEN becomes in some way marked as a less skilled Lojbanist.  Right
now, Lojban skill is marked by what you achieve in communicating in the
language and not by the rules that you fail to follow (though of course
failure to follow some portion of the rules renders you unintelligible).

For example, David Twery is considered by several people to be an excellent
Lojbanist, primarily on the basis of one rather error filled, longm rambling
writing that Nick and Mark S. among others commented up extensively.  he
demonstrated through usage that even when he made grammatical errors, he
was speaking Lojban and not encoded English, was understandable and
communicative.

>I agree. There will be a mismatch between the prescription and
>actual usage, and for some reason you feel that to be a success.

Well, it will be a success in that the community will have taken the
language from the prescribers, which was the original goal of Lojban as
distinct from the rest of Loglan, as I described above.

But I also think that logical consistency is an ideal for the language that
we are and will remain a long way from achieving for the indefinite future.
We have done far better than English in enabling such consistency, but
achieving it is something else.  And I think we do far better than our
"competitors" in the TLI community, whose Loglan smacks more of formal-logical
idiom, but also of the grossest of logical errors (as one might suspect in
a language version that lacks things like sumti raising and kau, and lambda
calculus and other weirdnesses).

>> I am quite sure that the evolving reality will still be a major order of
>> magnitude MORE logical than any natlang,
>
>How can that be gauged?

I am sure it will occur, but I am not competent to judge its achievement.
I think merely the overt identification of sumti raising and the possibilkity
of distinguishing between abstract and concrete (even if usage occasionally
fails in this regard) is  enough to make a big difference.

>> but the fact that large percentages
>> of the community have no training in logic and probably cannot even follow
>> the discussions in the refgrammar, much less your arcanities of Montague
>> semantics and lambda calculus, etc.,
>
>they are "my arcanities" only in that I understand neither.

They are your arcanities in that you (and others) feel that discussing them
is significant in advancing the language.  And I amend "Montague semantics"
to include any systematic or logical analysis of semantics that is independent
of actual usage (which we have too little of at present to serve as a basis
for such discussion).

>> means that those discussions will not
>> be heeded by most users unless you and JHorge reach an agreement and then
>> simply swamp out lesser usages by sheer volume of your good examples %^).
>
>No, no: that's not how it works. Take LE/LO. Before we began debating
>that, there was general confusion about it. Now most people have
>a fair idea of the difference.

NO.  Maybe a half dozen people who have read the discussion MAY have a fair
idea of the difference.  Nora hasn't seen it.  Bob C. probably hasn't accepted
what others have said.  I haven;t read it carefully enough to know what people
thaink the consensus is, and I probably disagree with it whatever it is.
dave Twery of recent mention has not seen it.  Nick has not seen it. Ivan
has expressly said that he hasn't read it.

I cannot get "most" out of this.  Remember that MOST of the Lojban community
has never subscriebed to Lojban List , and far fewer are actualkly subscribed
now.

>What works is to reach a consensus
>--More--
>through debate.

Whereas I want a consensu through usage followed by an explanation through
debate.

>In addition, one can also do a bit of usage
>vigilantism. But trying to influence others by the example of
>one's own usage is, I have observed, the very least effective
>method.

BUT it is the natural language method, and that is what we WANT.

>> THAT is the kind of usage-based prescription I want to see.  Jorge has gaine
>> much of his clout even in the face of my disagreement with his theories,
>> by simply using the language. Just as Nick did before him.
>
>I'm not sure what clout you mean, though I have observed that you
>rate people as Lojbanists by how much Lojban text they've written.

Not solely, though volume is worth something.  More important is how much
they are read and influence the usage of others.  Thus Ivan and Colin who have
posted no Lojban in years, and who never wrote all that much, have enormous
standing in my eyes.  Veijo similarly carries more credibility than the
Lojban he has written would suggest.

>That's quite healthy. Anyway, one doesn't need to keep up with
>everything.

In theory no.  But many people feel that they are derelict if they don't try.
In my case, I have had to assume that because Lojban text does NOT usually
contain substantive issues that I need to comment on, then I can skip them.
This is unfortunate as the Lojban discussions are most important.  My duty
is as well towards to new Lojbanists, whose brian comes to a complete stop
at the first jargon word, but who might get a lot out of a word for word
translation of a simple Lojban text.

>If one doesn't read a thread, one can always ask
>what the upshot was.

Almost never has such been posted, and when we have tried it, we often find
that half of what supposedly was agreed to was not really.  meanwhile large
number of people with a right to an opinion have not weighed in.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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