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| In a message dated 10/7/2002 8:19:41 PM Central Daylight Time, a.rosta@hidden.email writes: << It never ceases to amaze me that Loglan/Lojban >> Gee, that should make us feel a bit better after all the negative comments about the sorts of goofs that arise from committee planning (an oxymoron?). But, in fairness, Loglan was virtually a one-man operation: others may have proposed, but nothing happened until JCB figured out that he had really had the idea and then wrote it into law. So the mess there was not from a committee but from one man's foibles and flaws (although he wrote a section on it in L1, I'm not sure he ever really did understand the DeMorgan moves, for example). And that creation provided a (moderately stable -- since Lojban broke off at a point) baseline, as it were, for the next phase of modifications. << The weird situation is that there are loads of good ideas and Right Solutions buried under a film of crud. When we manage to scrape off the crud, as with le vs. lo, there's a sense of triumph. When we don't, as with CAhA (though Adam is currently having a go with this one), it's frustrating. >> The thought that some of the problems arose out of Good Idea which somehow got buried but can be recovered is also pretty flattering. I am doubtful that any significant number of Good Ideas are still there in bad disguises. People keep coming up with "the right" uses for things that are clearly not given the right uses, but I am not sure that there was originally a Good Idea there that got lost. More often, I think, it was people lost in an area, who put down something, since something was needed, but had little confidence (justly, it turns out) that it was the right way to go. It just fit some pattern we thought we discerned -- having missed another pattern that would have worked better (we now believe). I do wonder whether our insight at the moment, while convincingly better than that at the beginning, can yet claim finality to the point of forcing a change from the baseline: that no better change will turn up. << I wish I could get into Lojbab's head, though, to understand the mindset that cares enough to develop a language based on a load of fundamentally good ideas, but doesn't care if they are then buried by incomprehending specification or incomprehending usage. And he's not alone, of course, in thinking that way. >> I can't speak for Bob, though I doubt that this is a fair characterization of his position, My own (since I take the last remark to include me) is simply that we need a fixed target for people to learn. Once they do that, they can see "faults" and "correct" them ad lib. Some of these corrections may stick and some not. And, as they do and as there are enough Lojbanists in a full sense to actually do some teaching on the side, the reliance on the fixed structure of a textbook will diminish and language learning can be more nearly natural. In JCB's favorite story, the fixed language is the bootstrap by which we raise up the first generation of actual language users. After that, teh community takes over and dares the textbooks to keep up. |