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At 12:51 AM 6/2/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
Jordan: > The formalist > view requires that it be definitely proscriptive, if that's what > you're talking about with frozenness > > And the baseline is currently unfrozen, I remind you, but it is > still proscriptive Baseline = a definite specification that everybody heeds Frozen = baseline does not go through incremental version changes
I contend that the baseline remains frozen. This is one reason that I have argued (and did so again tonight on the Board list) that the byfy should not be incrementally changing the language as issues come up for discussion. The job of byfy is NOT to change the baseline but to complete the definition of the baseline. As part of that completion, we've agreed that it will be necessary to make some changes. I think that we should be defining everything that can be defined before considering any resolutions of conflicts, and we should have documented all resolutions of conflicts before we consider any baseline changes.
And I contend that if we do that, the changes that NEED to be made, can be relatively swiftly decided, and there will be a quasi-discontinuity in the baseline freeze as the few changes deemed necessary become part of the language.
byfy is NOT intended to be a vehicle for continuous incremental changes to the baseline, and any attempt to make it so faces one implacable veto from this member.
> In reality they're just naturalists: they support every attempt > to make lojban more english-like I'm a bit lost about who we're talking about here. If we're talking about the "I don't understand the logic, so I'm going to use Lojban as if it were my native English" school, then I agree. But if we're talking about the "Certain natural languages can express conceptually fundamental notions that Lojban cannot express in any practical way"
I should not in passing that such a claim requires a rather strong version of the SWH that anti-SWHers should not be lightly invoking.
> We all know it's a pretty amorphous goal anyway; no particular > scientific test was ever suggested or anything of the sort
Actually, JCB did suggest a scientific test in the last chapter of Loglan 1, which people can read on the TLI website. It was a poorly designed test, but it was a scientifically test nonetheless. Over the years I and others have suggested other such tests, but any such test requires a fluent community and research funding, and we don't have either yet, so fleshing out the details would be premature.
> It appears it was basically just name-dropping of a then-popular > linguistic idea Yes. But a significant constituency of the Lojban community hold "that sapir whorf crap" dear.
Yep.
> I also think anyone interested in lojban should read some books on > predicate logic, and don't buy the common rhetoric that you "shouldn't > have to" do that just to understand features of the language Ideally all lojbanists would do that. OTOH, learning lojban as a means of learning logic seems like quite a good thing.
And indeed one proposed SWH test involved comparing the "logical thinking" of Lojbanists not formally taught or studying logic with controls of lay people, lay people taught formal logic in English, and Lojbanists taught formal logic (before, during, or after learning the language).
The problem comes in figuring out how to teach Lojban without explicitly teaching formal logic. This would almost certainly happen with native speakers of Lojban (or other young kids learning Lojban). There would have to also be careful controls for IQ/math competence, etc. to get meaningful results.
If people learning to "think logically" to a degree not explainable by formal logic-teaching, there is some evidence that Lojban enhances such thinking.
This isn't a particularly easy test to conduct, but no one ever claimed that Lojban would make it easy to do so, merely plausible.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org