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pc:
> a.rosta@hidden.email writes:
>
> <<
>
> It never ceases to amaze me that Loglan/Lojban
> ever got created -- a changing cast of so many clever people involved,
> and somehow the collaboration worked. I find it hard to think of
> any analogues in the rest of our culture.
>
> >>
> 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?).
Exactly. Never in the field of human something has so much broth
remained so unspoilt by so many cooks.
> 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.
Quite possibly the Good Ideas were buried so long and so deep that
they have long since rotted away, but one can browse through the mahoste
and see traces of them.
> 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.
A case in point would be {da'i}, which I suspect to once up a time
have been a marker of 'speculative' illocutionary force but which,
due to its gloss, has been turned into an irrealis marker, with
a function that I believe once belonged to {ka'e}, which in turn
has come to mean "innately capable of", and so on and so forth...
> 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 agree. The only point of the baseline is to assuage fears of
endless change.
> <<
> 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)
Do you mean you include yourself? -- For I certainly don't include
you. Indeed, I can't think of anybody I'd exclude more.
And I don't think I'm being unfair to Bob. I'm pretty much reporting
what he's said on the list. He gives his reasons, so I'm not
accusing him of idiocy. I suppose, now I come to think about it,
that he was attracted to the ostensible purpose of Loglan as some
kind of whorfian experiment, and he pledged himself to bring it
to fruition, so the presence of the fundamentally good ideas was
never that much of a big deal for him -- and hence their loss isn't
either.
> 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.
Indeed, but I gather that in this scenario, the loss of the Good
Ideas is potentially an acceptable casualty in the progress to
achieving that autonomous base of users.
--And.