me lu ju'i lobypli li'u 14 moi
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Copyright, 1991, by the Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA Phone (703) 385-0273 [email protected] All rights reserved. Permission to copy granted subject to your verification that this is the latest version of this document, that your distribution be for the promotion of Lojban, that there is no charge for the product, and that this copyright notice is included intact in the copy. Number 14 - March 1991 Copyright 1991, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031 USA (703)385-0273 Permission granted to copy, without charge to recipient, when for purpose of promotion of Loglan/Lojban. Fund-Raising Drive Successful Regular In-Language Activities Started Loglan Trademark Claim Cancelled LogFest 91 - 21-24 June 1991 Details Inside, and More. Ju'i Lobypli (JL) is the quarterly journal of The Logical Language Group, Inc., known in these pages as la lojbangirz. la lojbangirz. is a non-profit organization formed for the purpose of completing and spreading the logical human language "Lojban - A Realization of Loglan" (commonly called "Lojban"), and informing the community about logical languages in general. For purposes of terminology, "Lojban" refers to a specific version of a logical language, the generic language and associated research project having been called "Loglan" since its invention by Dr. James Cooke Brown in 1954. Statements referring to "Loglan/Lojban" refer to both the generic language and to Lojban as a specific instance of that language. la lojbangirz. is a non-profit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. Your donations (not contributions to your voluntary balance) are tax-deductible on U.S. and most state income taxes. Donors are notified at the end of each year of their total deductible donations. We note for all potential donors that our bylaws require us to spend no more than 30% of our receipts on administrative expenses, and that you are welcome to make you gifts conditional upon our meeting this requirement. Page count this issue: 96+8 enclosures ($10.40 North America, $12.48 elsewhere). Press run for this issue of Ju'i Lobypli: 270. We now have about 600 people on our active mailing list, and 200 more awaiting textbook publication. Your Mailing Label Your mailing label reports your current mailing status, and your current voluntary balance including this issue. Please notify us if you wish to be in a different mailing code category. Balances reflect contributions received thru 13 March 1991. Mailing codes (and approximate annual balance needs) are defined as follows: Level B - Product Announcements Only Level R - This is a Review Copy for Publications Level 0 - le lojbo karni - $4 initially + $5/year balance requested Level 1 - Ju'i Lobypli - $20 initially + $20/year balance requested Level 2 - Level 1 materials and baselined products - $25 initially + $25/year balance requested Level 3 - Level 2 materials and lesson materials - $50 initially + $40/year balance requested Please keep us informed of changes in your mailing address, and US subscribers are asked to provide ZIP+4 codes whenever you know them. (We now have to!) Contents of This Issue 2 We skipped one quarterly issue cycle, but have now resumed our activities. This longer than average issue should help make up for the long wait. This issue reports on the news of the last 6 months. In addition, we briefly survey the 'areas of interest' that are listed on our registration form, so that you can see the scope of Lojban activities, and the potential in each area. We then move from this general discussion into the specific topic of Lojban and linguistics, with which the bulk of this issue deals. (Please pardon the occasional jargon therein - some contributors were writing for a different audience. We've tried to elaborate on the jargon where it seemed necessary for understanding. The lead article on this topic is John Cowan's response to the 1969 critical review of Loglan written by linguist Dr. Arnold Zwicky; that review was never responded to by Dr. Brown, to the detriment of Loglan/Lojban's acceptance in the linguistics community. We also include edited transcripts of some computer network discussions regarding Lojban, Esperanto, and linguistics, and a brief description of Lojban written for linguists (as opposed to our brochure discussion for laymen). Finally, we print some of your letters, with responses. Thanks to all of you for your continued interest and support. Included are final words for now on the subject of Esperanto and Lojban, including a more scholarly discussion on 'rule-counting'. Bob LeChevalier continues his regular 'column' written directly in Lojban, and without translation. All subscribers should have all the materials needed to read this text. We also have other texts of various levels of difficulty, including a simple and familiar fairy tale. Table of Contents News Finances --3 Using the Language --5 Language Development Activities --6 Products Status, Prices, and Ordering --9 Publicity --11 International News --13 News From the Institute - Trademark Cancellation --14 A Survey of Lojban Applications --16 Response to Arnold Zwicky's 1969 Review of Loglan 1 --21 A First Cut at a Linguistic Description of Lojban --29 Computer Network Discussions on Loglan/Lojban and Linguistics (and Esperanto and ...) --30 including Lojban gismu Etymologies --60 Proposed Lojban Machine Grammar Baseline Changes --67 Letters, Comments, and Responses - Vincent Burch, John Hodges, Bernard Golden, David Morrow --70 le lojbo se ciska - some comparative artificial linguistics, a story, and more --76 Translations of le lojbo se ciska --88 The Recent Press Release --Back Page (96) Enclosures - cmavo change list, Lojban Grammar in E-BNF form Computer Net Information Via Usenet/UUCP/Internet, you can send messages and text files (including things for JL publication) to Bob at: [email protected] You can also join the Lojban news-group. Send your mailing address to: [email protected] Send traffic for the news-group to: [email protected] Please keep us informed if your network mailing address changes. Compuserve subscribers can also participate. Precede any of the above addresses with INTERNET: and use your normal Compuserve mail facility. Usenet/Internet people can send to Compuserve addresses by changing the comma in the Compuserve address to a period: [email protected] FIDOnet subscribers can also participate, although the connection is not especially robust. Write to us for details. Whether you wish to participate in the news-group or not, it is useful for us to know your Compuserve or Usenet/Internet address. 3 We've been requested to more explicitly identify people who are referred to by initials in JL, and will regularly do so in this spot, immediately before the news section. Note that 'Athelstan' is that person's real name, used in his public life, and is not a pseudonym. 'pc' - Dr. John Parks-Clifford, Professor of Logic and Philosophy at the University of Missouri - St. Louis and Vice- President of la lojbangirz.; he is usually addressed as 'pc' by the community. 'Bob', 'lojbab' - Bob LeChevalier - President of la lojbangirz., and editor of Ju'i Lobypli and le lojbo karni. 'Nora' - Nora LeChevalier - Secretary/Treasurer of la lojbangirz., Bob's wife, author of LogFlash. 'JCB', 'Dr. Brown'- Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of the language, and founder of the Loglan project. 'The Institute', 'TLI' - The Loglan Institute, Inc., JCB's organization for spreading his version of Loglan, which we call 'Institute Loglan'. 'Loglan' - This refers to the generic language or language project, of which 'Lojban' is the most successful version, and Institute Loglan another. 'Loglan/Lojban' is used in discussions about Lojban where we wish to make it particularly clear that the statement applies to the generic language as well. News Finances As most of you know, we sent out a fund-raising letter in November to all US, Canada, and Mexico subscribers, requesting that people contribute against their voluntary balance, or to donate extra money if their balance was positive. Our finances after JL13 had reached a crisis state, and action needed to be taken. I want to thank those of you who responded to our fund-raising letter. We received over 100 contributions in response to that letter in 6 weeks, more than twice the number of letters we usually receive in 3 months in response to a JL issue. Clearly, you prefer to be bugged about finances in a direct letter rather in the pages of this issue. $3500 in contributions was received in November and December, and small amounts continue to trickle in. Of that money, most was payments against voluntary balances, but over $1000 of it was in donations. (We have sent out summary notices for tax purposes acknowledging all donations received during 1990. If you believe that you made a donation and did not get a receipt, please let us know.) A secondary goal of the mailing was to identify people who were not reading our publications, and who wished to be dropped to a lower level of mailing, or who wished to be dropped entirely until at least after the textbook is published. Some 25 of the respondents requested such a drop in level. A tertiary goal of the mailing was to identify as many as possible incorrect addresses. Our normal 3rd class bulk mailing has a label requesting forwarding, and guaranteeing forwarding postage. However, such notices are often ignored by the post office, which treats bulk mailings as being of the lowest priority. Moral: if you want to keep getting material from us, make sure we get a change of address from you when you move - don't rely on the post office to tell us. To our first class mailing, we received over 35 such notices of incorrect addresses, many of which also had no for- warding notice on file with the post office. All in all the letter was a big success, much better than we had hoped for in response to our plea, especially given a recession in the economy and the distractions of world events. We finished the year with over $4000 in the bank, and are no longer living from week to week. We aren't out of the woods yet, of course. While we have $4000 in the bank, voluntary balances total $4500. So we still technically owe more than we have. In addition, legal bills, which Jeff Prothero and Bob have committed to paying, constitute a recorded liability on our accounts of some $6000, making our net worth substantially negative. And we still need to accumulate $5000-$10000 for publication of the Lojban textbook. So don't hold back just because we're not on the point of bankruptcy anymore. Still, you can rest assured that we are in business for a while to come, and if you continue to respond when we are really in need, you can count on la lojbangirz. being around to support your Loglan/Lojban interests and efforts. We have a head start on finances this year. Sylvia Rutiser has pledged a donation of at least $1000 in support of la lojbangirz. for the coming year. Following is a summary of the la lojbangirz. financial report for 1990. This report has not yet been finalized and approved by the Board of Directors. 1990 Financial Report 1990 1989 Income Contributions/Deferred Reimbursements $8523.37 $8037.88 Donations $6164.90 $7633.40 ________ ________ 4 Net Income $14688.27 $15671.28 Expenses Printing and Publications $3892.76 $5643.92 Non-administrative Postage $1001.85 $1903.91 Virginia Sales Tax Collections $34.02 $40.32 Royalties $60.00 $50.00 Office Supplies $434.86 $494.13 Software $0.00 $102.41 LogFest/LogFair $957.87 $394.11 Advertising/Publicity/Conventions $39.70 $1602.90 Telephone $1180.62 $1239.53 Administrative Expenses $228.19 $518.71 Legal Expenses $3082.00 $4099.68 ________ ________ $3310.19 $3310.19 $4618.39 $4618.39 30% ________ 29% _______ Net Expenses $11052.68 $16089.62 Net Gain/Loss $3635.59 (418.34) la lojbangirz. Finances as of 1 January 1991 Assets Cash in bank account $4276.02 Undeposited checks $109.49 Estimated Value of Inventory $703.30 ________ Net Assets $5089.51 Liabilities Subscriber Voluntary Balances Refundable (See Attachment B) ($4550.36) Unpaid Legal Fees ($6360.00) VA State Sales Tax Collections ($12.83) __________ Net Liabilities ($10923.19) Estimated Net Worth ($5833.68) Estimated net worth at incorporation in 11/88 was $1427.02 Estimated net worth on 1 January 1990 was ($737.04) The most significant component of our huge drop in net worth is the unfunded legal liability. Jeff Prothero and Bob LeChevalier have committed to funding this liability in full. At our current expenditure rate, this will take about 2 years to pay off. With the February 1991 trademark ruling in our favor, additional legal fees are expected to be minimal. 5 Subscription Accounts as of 1 January 1991 Conversation sessions - After several delays while we tried to find an optimal meeting day, Lojbanists in the The mailing list of The Logical Language Group, Inc. Washington DC area have now started a weekly Lojban consisted of 735 accounts. Of these, 544 were currently conversation/learning session. A group of 6 Lojbanists of active (level 0 or above). Known readership is about 50 varying skill levels has been meeting on Tuesday evenings more than this, due to multiple readers sharing single sub- at Bob and Nora's house to use the language. These 6 are scriptions. (The number has grown by over 35 in the first Bob and Nora, Athelstan, Sylvia Rutiser, Darren Stalder, 6 weeks of 1991.) and Keith Lynch. Others have inquired and are expected to Payment rates are highly correlated with level. 45-60% join within the next few weeks; if you are in or visiting of those at level 1 or above maintain a positive balance. the DC area and want to drop in, contact Bob at 703-385- Only 15% of the level 0 recipients have positive balances. 0273. You needn't be especially skilled in the language; This is not sufficient for long term financial security; none of the rest of us are, either. From the experience donations do not make up the difference and no extra money thus far, it is useful to know as much vocabulary as is left over for non-subscription activities. possible. You'll pick up the grammar easily (sentence As of 14 February, there were 92 subscribers at level 3, complexity tends to be fairly simple), but a novice will 100 at level 2, 55 at level 1, 332 at level 0, and 191 at spend most of the time hunting through words lists in order level B for a total of 770. About 20% of our subscribers to follow what is being said. (On the other hand, Keith, are non-U.S., with about 1/2 of these in Canada. who is a relative novice, says that he has learned some words quickly simply by looking them up over and over.) Sales or distributions of key products as of 1 January The emphasis during the sessions is on actual Lojban 1990: conversation, and no English is spoken for about 2 hours (8-10PM). Before and after the 2-hour sessions, there are gismu lists 601 discussions of translation, grammar questions, and other LogFlash/Mac LojFlash 133 things better handled in English. We are hoping to flash cards 30 eventually start regularly offering a mini-lesson for new Lessons beyond Lesson 1 127 Lojbanists during the hour before the Lojban session. 83 persons have donated a total of $13976.31 since Letter exchanges - Sylvia has been working on one other incorporation (32/$7842.15 incorporation through end of aspect of bringing Lojban to life. She has written to two 1989; 36/$5093.63 from before incorporation); 46 donors Lojbanists who have written to us in Lojban, and is working donated during 1990, including $1529 each from Bob & Nora on letters to a couple of others. (If you write a letter and from Jeff Prothero that was applied to legal fees; to us in Lojban, and include a translation so we can figure others donated a net of $3106.94. out any errors, you WILL get an answer, though we can't promise how quickly.) Michael Helsem has written a 157 persons have net positive voluntary balances. (complicated) letter on Lojban and poetry to Athelstan, as 542 persons have net negative voluntary balances. well as several to Bob, and Athelstan is working on an All others have 0 balances. answer. Bob doesn't have time to respond to Lojban letters personally (except for really short ones), and passes them 13 people have balances >$100, 40 have balances >$50, 89 to Sylvia, who wants the practice. Of course, if she have balances >$20. These are the people who are keeping writes to you, please respond reasonably quickly so that us afloat. We need a much higher percentage of you in she knows whether you understood any of her writing. these categories. Translations and writings - As shown in this issue, there Bob's proposed budget for 1991 (not yet approved by the have also been several people working on writings and Directors) presumes balance contributions of about $13400, translations of various length and complexity. In legal donations of $6600 from Bob and Nora and Jeff addition, Jamie Bechtel has translated an Ursula Leguin Prothero, $4800 in donations from the rest of you, and short story, which we plan to publish after getting a copy- expenses of around $25600, for a net loss of $729. To meet right release from the author. Bob has also intermittently this budget, we need as many as possible of you to pay your worked on a translation of the first chapter of Heinlein's share (as appropriate for your mailing level); otherwise we The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but this also needs a will repeat last year's financial crisis. copyright release. He is also working on the initial story of Burton's Arabian Nights (the Scheherazade story), which is both not copyrighted and written in the style of the Using the Language original Arabic, giving us a flavor of translation other than from English. (It is obviously preferable to While we have been laying low for 6 months, husbanding translate things that are not copyrighted, or that the our money carefully, the language has been progressing in copyright has expired. Sherlock Holmes or Lewis Carroll, several directions. This section discusses progress in anyone?) making Loglan/Lojban a living language. 6 Carter translation - One translation project that has floor space. Especially if coming from out-of-town, we been started, albeit slowly, is the attempt to update two recommend letting us know in advance that you are coming, stories by Jim Carter, originally written in 1984 in an how many, and when you expect to arrive and leave, so we earlier version of Loglan, to fit the current language. can plan logistics; drop-ins are of course welcome, though. These are full-fledged short stories, not just sentences or Based on previous years expenses, we ask for a voluntary paragraphs, and are quite a bit longer than even the Saki donation of around $30 per person for the whole weekend to short story translation published in JL10. The first being cover food, beverages, etc. Many give more, a few come who worked on is called 'Akira', and is a science fiction cannot contribute. (Money contributed on this weekend, story; the other is called 'The Welding Shop'. unless specifically noted, is considered a donation towards We are trying to involve as many people as possible in LogFest expenses, and does not apply to voluntary bal- this effort, each taking a sentence or a paragraph, or even ances.) a couple of tanru. Since the vocabulary has changed so We hope to see as many Lojbanists as possible at our considerably since 1984, and Jim Brown's versions of the activities this year. language have had so many defective tanru, volunteers can work on problems as small as a single word. For example, in Sylvia Rutiser's translation of the first paragraph of the Akira story, printed later in this issue, she was quite Language Development Activities dissatisfied with the tanru she devised for 'to fall by parachute'. We welcome all suggestions for this concept, A lot of work has been done in the area of language and any others in that paragraph. We also pose another development, much of it by John Cowan, who in only several paragraph for translation, which we ask all of you to work months has become the principal expert on the formal on, again even if only a word or two. Sylvia will compile grammar (thus relieving Bob of a major burden). the results for next issue. As more people become skilled in the language, we can pass out larger chunks of the text. Grammar baseline changes and BNF development - As reported in last issue, John aided in the final push for a LogFair - We had a get-together at Bob and Nora's house, grammar baseline, devising new designs for MEX (the grammar the last weekend in October. Turnout was small, and the of mathematical expressions), the tense grammar, and the discussion ranged over a wide area of topics. A smaller method of expressing letters and symbols. We did an awful version of LogFest, we hope to hold future LogFairs at lot of work in only a few weeks, and unfortunately, not all other locations besides the Washington DC area. of it was perfect. John has found a few mistakes in further analysis. Logfest 91 - The annual meeting of la lojbangirz., and Over the 6 months since the baseline, John has the associated celebration of Lojban, will be held a week effectively done a complete analysis of the grammar, almost later this year than in previous years, on the weekend of from scratch. He did this by developing an alternative way 22-23 June 1991, at Bob and Nora's house in the suburban of describing the grammar, using a method called Extended Washington DC area. (We officially start on Friday night Backus-Naur Form (E-BNF). Unlike the YACC form of the and end on Monday morning, but those two days tend to be grammar (YACC is a tool for developing computer languages), primarily social.) The schedule change allows us to miss published last issue, the E-BNF form is condensed and several competing activities that have prevented people considerably easier to understand. John's BNF grammar, from coming in the past. If you are planning to come and enclosed with this issue, requires only 4 pages of standard do not know how to get here, contact us by letter or phone type. The E-BNF grammar is similar to the baseline machine at the address or phone given for la lojbangirz. (day or grammar, including some minor proposals as described below. evenings); we are on a major rapid transit line and thus The problem with an E-BNF grammar is that it cannot be easily accessible to all modes of transportation. verified as unambiguous using YACC. This required a lot of The major design decisions about the language having been checking and cross-checking. In the process of doing this, made before now, we are hoping to shift the emphasis of our every rule of the grammar had to be examined. Some things gathering from language design to language use and showed up as problems: application. There will thus be sessions on teaching and - errors made in the last minute push for a baseline, learning the language, including demonstrations of our sometimes only typos, other times rules that were teaching materials, Lojban conversation for novices as well accidentally deleted; as for more advanced students, group efforts at Lojban - asymmetries between similar structures in the grammar, translation, etc. There also may be discussion of specific such as differing priority for logical connectives in Lojban applications. There will be a limited amount of compound bridi as compared to other logical connective preplanned programming; call us the week before the structures; gathering to find out details. On the other hand, most - rules that were clumsily constructed, often as fossils activities will be ad-hoc, determined by the interests of of earlier versions of the grammar when they were those present at any given time. necessary. You can come for one day or the entire weekend; families John also volunteered to work on a Lojban parser, and in are welcome. Most attendees who spend the entire weekend, thinking about the parser design, proposed some minor bring sleeping bags or borrow blankets; we have plenty of changes that would make the design easier. 7 As a result of all of this analysis, John has proposed 19 about 6 months before the dictionary is done. John Cowan changes to the baseline grammar, of which 3 were withdrawn is working on a catalog describing each selma'o and its after discussion. The 16 that remain may sound like a lot, grammar, with examples of each usage; this will not be done but each is very minor, often affecting only 1 or 2 rules for several months. of the roughly 600 in the YACC grammar baseline. Even this overstates the effect on the average Lojban student's Lack of gismu-making - There were 20 gismu approved or learning effort. Most of the changes are additions or proposed for making at last LogFest. We had commitments enhancements to the language, and I doubt if any of the from several people to help with the source language look- grammar changes proposed affect any text that has been up. Unfortunately, some of these people failed to come written thus far in the language. Thus, the language can through. As a result, we have only partial input on Hindi be considered quite stable, though clearly the grammar is source words and no input at all on Arabic sources. The not quite as mature as the gismu list, now baselined for 2 other source language research has been ready for months. 1/2 years. We are pursuing other alternate researchers, and ask any The changes are described along with their purpose and members of the community who know either language to justification in an article below. The principal design volunteer your assistance either to suggest source words or group has looked over these changes and accepted them, but check others work. (You should have a bilingual dictionary publication of the proposals is a necessary step for a if you are not fluent in the language.) baseline change. Thus you have an opportunity to comment Because of this, the words have not been constructed, and or ask questions about these changes, prior to a formal we have downgraded the priority of producing a revised approval decision, expected at or before LogFest. Anyone gismu list incorporating the new words and updated and who has worked in depth with the grammar, and wants to see clarified place structures for each word. the specific rule changes proposed, may write or send a computer-mail message to us, and we'll be happy to provide Place structure review - In conjunction with the addition it. of words to the gismu list, we have been conducting a slow There may be additional changes at this very low level up review of the place structure of every word in the gismu until the completion of the textbook and dictionary. These list. The review includes updates of Roget's Thesaurus will be as a result of actual usage or problems discovered categories for each word; Athelstan did a rough-cut at as- as a result of finally having a parser incorporating the signing these categories while we were reviewing the list complete set of rules. However, you shouldn't get the idea for baseline over 2 years ago. An effort is being made to that the language is unstable because of these changes, ensure that place structures are consistent for words in requiring a significant effort at relearning, since they the same Roget category. will almost certainly be changes in seldom-used features of You can hardly imagine the difficulty of this review; it the language. Ju'i Lobypli will continue to publish such takes total mastery of the gismu list to do a comprehensive proposals as they are presented and preliminarily approved. check, and only Bob has achieved that. Others are reviewing pieces of the list, and Bob is checking their cmavo list - As part of John Cowan's review, a couple of suggestions. (All readers are encouraged to pose questions lexemes (word grammatical categories) have been eliminated, and suggestions about place structures, and these will be and the associated cmavo freed. (As a side note, we will considered.) Of course Bob's higher priority is textbook be trying to phase out use of the word 'lexeme' for these writing, but the review must be completed before the categories, in favor of the Lojban word "selma'o", (from se textbook is done, since we don't want to have examples with cmavo) or cmavo word category. 'Lexeme', used by Jim Brown inconsistent place structures. and adopted by everyone else, turns out to be an incorrect Remember that place structures will be a long-evolving linguistic term for the concept - the appropriate term is part of the language, and will not even be considered really 'grameme'. But since few people know these jargon baselined at dictionary publication (though publication of terms anyway, we would rather use the non-jargon Lojban a dictionary will inherently make changes much more word.) difficult). This is because the place structures As a result of two place structure changes, we had to implicitly contain the meaning of the words, meanings that make some minor changes to associated gismu in selma'o BAI, will never be static, and cannot truly be defined until and to add one new cmavo to that selma'o. A couple of there are significant numbers of language users. additional words were independently proposed, for various On the other hand, none of us who are speaking, writing, reasons. or translating in Lojban have been significantly hindered Since the cmavo list has NOT been baselined, the changes by nebulous place structures. We make the best guess we listed later in this issue are approved and now in force can, and use paraphrases if a listener doesn't understand, (although some of them are technically dependent on thus bypassing any confusion. approval of the grammar baseline change). We provide the Thus, we have demonstrated what we have often claimed, list on a separate page for people who wish to attach it to YOU DO NOT NEED TO MEMORIZE THE PLACE STRUCTURES TO USE their cmavo lists. Alternatively (and probably LOJBAN. As you use the language, you will master them preferably), you can manually update your copy of the cmavo practically by osmosis, making mistakes and then learning lists to reflect these changes. No new publication of the from them. But mistakes are useful, too; they help us cmavo list is expected prior to a preliminary baseline define the weak points in the place structures, and in some 8 cases indicate that normal usage of a word differs from the long-winded, so we cannot even hope to summarize them here. place structure that we devised. Two major topics in the last couple of months have been the expression of intervals, the possible need for special gismu making errors of the past - As a side project, late tenses to describe relativistic situations, and the desire at night or when he can't concentrate (seemingly much too by some readers for a formal theory describing the seman- often it seems), Bob has been going back through the tics of the language. Discussions on these topics computer outputs that generated the gismu 3 years ago, an continue, and we are archiving everything that is said. If extracting the scores and etymologies that led to the you have particular interest in one of these topics, let us current word being chosen. The project is roughly half know, and we may discuss it in more detail, or offer a done. special-order publication consisting of transcripts of the Along the way, unfortunate discoveries have occurred. In discussion. about 5% of the words, some type of manual error was made in the rush to compile the list. In half of these or so, the error is insignificant: an erroneous score or cross- Products Status, Prices, and Ordering reference error. In the rest, often due to Bob's sloppy handwriting or typos, the word recorded for a concept was We have no new products to announce this issue, although not the highest scoring one. In most cases, the word significant progress was made on several that will actually selected differs by only one character from what hopefully come to fruition within the next several months. it should be, but given the nature of the scoring A reminder that our pricing policy includes a 20% algorithm, this sometimes leads to a significantly lower discount for a prepaid order over $20 (prepaid = positive recognition score. balance exceeding the price at the time of shipment). In short, we screwed up sometimes. The result is not a There is a 20% surcharge for non-North-American orders; the severe problem, and changing the words wasn't even 20% discount on large prepaid orders will cancel the considered - the actual etymologies of individual words is overseas surcharge. The overseas surcharge may have to simply not that important to any of Loglan's goals. The rise due to increased postal fees, but not until at least only requirement is for neutrality. Since the errors are next issue. Virginia orders should add 4.5% sales tax. small in number and fairly random, the only effect is a Note also that for software, there is no surcharge for MS- trivial increase in learning difficulty. And this increase DOS 3 1/2" diskettes, but you must specify in your order if is real only if the recognition scores used to decide on you want them. the words actually do correlate with learnability of the We cannot promise to fill an order unless it is prepaid; words. our finances remain too thin. A more systematic error was found in our Lojban transcription of Russian words. Though the check has only Textbook - One effort that has not made much progress has been cursory, it appears that in several cases, we made been the Lojban textbook. About 45 pages were done by mistakes in Lojbanizing the Russian vowels, which LogFair in late October, but almost no work has been done frequently change in sound depending on the declension, and since then. There are a lot of reasons for this, but in on the syllable stress. As a result, the Russian con- the final analysis Bob simply hasn't managed to treat this tribution to some words will be incorrect, and learning for effort as the highest priority, as he and everyone else Russian students of Lojban presumably slightly more want. Too many short-term distractions and emergencies. difficult. Again, though, the effect is not expected to be If blame must be placed, most of us have some part in the significant, and we have data that will allow us to delay; the final responsibility is, however, Bob's. accurately measure the effect, if any of this systematic Hopefully, things are improving in this regard. error. (Lojbanization of Russian words inherently has LogFlash - The news on LogFlash is a good as the news on systematic errors due to declensions that shift and the textbook is bad. A version of LogFlash capable of sometimes omit sounds.) handling the August cmavo list turned out to be almost Once the computer lists have been verified, we will make trivial to produce. (This version is currently called the etymologies available in hard copy or electronic form. LogFlash 3, but the set may be renumbered before Data is being stored in Lojbanized phonetic spelling. We publication). Bob has gone through all of the words using do not plan in the short term to publish a list showing the this program and is working in Maintenance mode at actual source words, primarily because we would need mastering the set. special text fonts and alphabets on our computers. Meanwhile Nora has been working on the enhanced revision However, a sample of the intermediate work appears in a to LogFlash, which will handle the updated gismu list (with later article this issue. This effort is a low priority 100 character definitions instead of 40 character ones), one, though how much time we spend on it will partly depend and add a wide variety of new features, described in previ- on how much interest is shown by you readers. ous issues. The program will also provide the capability to log data needed for research into the language learning Computer Network Discussions - There have been numerous process, including a test of Jim Brown's recognition score discussions of Lojban's design on the lojban-list computer algorithm. mailing network, which now has over 100 readers. These are Nora's update is mostly complete, and the program is generally highly specialized discussions, and often rather being tested by a couple of Lojban students, most notably 9 Sylvia Rutiser, who has gone through the gismu list in only lines of code and is non-trivial to convert. We are thus a few weeks and is working on her second pass. not planning to distribute the LogFlash source. Conversion The changes to support cmavo list learning with the new volunteers should know both Turbo-Pascal and C and the version are just as easy as for the old version, and Sylvia problems in converting from the former to the latter. is also nearly through her first pass on the cmavo using There is a lot of input/output processing, and the last this program. The results of using LogFlash have proven (and most successful) conversion effort stalled out on con- awesome when we sit down on Tuesday evenings to speak in verting this processing. the language. Bob and Sylvia only rarely need to look at a word list, while those who haven't studied the words spend Parser - As noted above, John Cowan has started working a lot of time paging through the lists. on a Lojban parser which will reflect the baseline grammar. We hope to have gismu list and cmavo list versions of This much-awaited software will finally allow us to do the LogFlash available by LogFest in June, or perhaps the next proper test of the grammar that is needed, as well as Ju'i Lobypli issue thereafter. A rafsi list version will provide an excellent teaching tool to students of the lan- probably wait an additional few months; we have yet to guage with appropriate computers. John expects to have the receive any reports that anyone besides Bob and Nora have parser available for testing by LogFest in June. Priority started studying the rafsi using the existing LogFlash 2. for test copies will be for people with highly positive All of these updates are for PC-compatible MS-DOS balances and those who have actually been writing in the machines. Dave Cortesi is working on an update to his language. General distribution will of course depend on Hypercard program equivalent for the MacIntosh; we have had how testing goes. no discussions with Richard Kennaway regarding an update to his MacIntosh version, since the Hypercard version, while a Other Software - The random sentence generator update has bit slower in execution speed, uses the Mac voice been held up pending John Cowan's grammar change proposals, synthesizer function to provide spoken Lojban along with discussed elsewhere in this issue. David Bowen reports a the flash cards. We expect Dave's program to be available simple equivalent program using the UNIX-based AWK at approximately the same time as the PC LogFlash version. language; write to us for details if interested. There Efforts to produce a UNIX C version of LogFlash appear to have been no changes to the lujvo-making program, which may have stalled out, and given the closeness of the new PC be integrated with the future version of LogFlash 2 (rafsi- version will likely be delayed until after it is complete. teaching). We get lots of volunteers to make this conversion (for UNIX and other machines), but few if any have ever produced Software Pricing - Software is the only product la anything. The new program is over 4000 lojbangirz. produces right now that we make any significant profit on. Thus, we need significant sales of these items to help cover all the people who aren't paying for our pro- ducts. Indeed, our financial troubles last year were no doubt in part due to very low software sales and our lack of new products in this area. Because of our financial situation, we cannot distribute our software for free. If we get more of you to pay for the printed matter, we can reconsider this, but no change is likely until well after textbook publication. We may continue to offer the old software more liberally, recognizing that it will be obsolete and much inferior to the new version. This will allow us to support those who can't afford to pay but want to learn the language, while providing significant value to our paying customers. Exceptions, if any, will be for people who perform volunteer efforts valuable enough that someone else donates money to cover the cost of their copy, or who demonstrate by trying to use the language that our support of their use of LogFlash will bring results. When the new versions of the program come out, there will be a substantial discount (at least 50%) for upgrades from people who have the program and a positive balance. People who have contributed money but do not have a positive bal- ance may receive a lesser discount. As always, prepaid orders over $20 will gain a 20% discount. Comments on this policy are welcome. (Note that old versions of LogFlash are still available as Shareware on the Amrad BBS - see the introductory brochure for the telephone number. We would of course 10 prefer that you register and pay for this software, getting design on some publications as well, after computerizing the latest version, but have no complaint if those who it, and see what people think. Thus we have two logos, cannot pay obtain the program in this way. We will pro- which were opposed by only 2 people among the voters. bably continue to offer a less-advanced Shareware version A couple of people sent in new designs after the ballot of LogFlash for the indefinite future, since the principle was produced, and I unfortunately missed one by Kerry of mass distribution of language information is a Pearson in preparing the ballot. But we needed to have a fundamental one for la lojbangirz.) final decision, and these will be the logos for at least the next few years. Postal Rates - The recent increase in US Postal Rates was A few people voted for none of the selections, indicating between 15 and 20%. This amounts to 1-2 cents/page added a misunderstanding of the purpose of the logo 'contest'. to our production costs. This renders our temporary price These people identified "logos" with commercialism, and increase of last summer necessarily permanent - it is not wanted us to have a less commercial image. A couple yet clear whether we are selling materials for more than we suggested that instead we devise a "logo" that was more of pay for them. If not, you can expect a price rise next a slogan, perhaps graphically displayed. This isn't issue, probably to 12 cents/page US/Canada and 15 practical for a few reasons: cents/page overseas; we'll continue to absorb the slight - the logo is intended to be a symbol and graphic images difference between US and Canadian postage costs. make better symbols than text, however it is displayed. We are considering going to second-class mailing for Ju'i "Logo" is a shortening of "logograph", which more clearly Lobypli and/or le lojbo karni, though possibly not for a indicates its purpose; few months. For a relatively small cost difference, we - among other places, the logo will probably be used on would get better speed of delivery and more assurance that the textbook, where there will already be plenty of text you will actually get the issue. Mailing in the same class (the title, subtitle, and the 'blurb on the back'). The as junk mail is risky. purpose of the logo is to leave a strong image that stands One requirement of second-class mailing is demonstration out against all that writing; that most of our readership actually wants to receive the - there is a commercial purpose to the logo. It is a publication. The best way to prove this is with paid symbol for la lojbangirz. as well as, and possibly more subscriptions, with explicit letters also valuable. Thus than, for the language (this unfortunately may not have it is important that we hear from you regularly, preferably been in the minds of the designers and voters, but, oh with money; at least once per year is very desirable. well). While we are a non-profit organization, we must operate as a business, sending out correspondence, fund- 9-digit Zip - The new rates also come with new rules, raising letters, etc. The logo, printed by computer with though we aren't yet certain just what these rules are. It our letterhead, will enhance the visual appearance of our is possible that we will need to use Zip+4 9-digit codes on business correspondence, calling attention to our letter. our US mailings to get optimal postage rates, and possibly (At least this is how the theory goes.) even to get assured delivery. Thus, whenever you send us a - a slogan in any language other than Lojban (such as change of address, please tell us the Zip+4 number as soon English) would suggest a bias toward that language, and we as you know it. are fighting hard to avoid such biases. If the text were in Lojban, non-Lojbanists (and some inactive supporters) Rhyming Dictionaries - Michael Helsem announces wouldn't know what it means, making it a less meaningful availability of Lojban gismu rhyming dictionaries for symbol than the words might intend; prospective poets. Price $5 ea. Specify normal or half- - we already have a Lojban slogan of a sort. Claude Van rhyme versions. Send to Michael Helsem, 1031 DeWitt Circle Horne coined ".e'osai ko sarji la lojban." a couple of Dallas TX 75224. years ago, and we have produced and distributed Publicity calligraphic buttons with that slogan as well as used it on many of our publications. We are of course interested in Logo - Surprisingly to me at least, there was a clear more Lojban slogans and aphorisms, but this requires you to winner in the logo balloting from Ju'i Lobypli #13. The make them up, and the issue is any case separate from the selected logo was supposed to be on this issue; maybe next logo issue. time. The winner, designed by Guy Garnett, received a large majority of positive votes among the 35-40 ballots Electronic Distribution - We have had a committee non- received before the October deadline, and was first choice working on a policy for electronic distribution of our on many of them. In fact, only 5 ballots were marked as materials since LogFest. For various reasons, the disliking the selection. Of these 5, 3 were in favor of committee pretty much fell apart within a couple of weeks, the 2nd place finisher (a distant 2nd, but with far more and efforts to get the effort going again have so far been 'likes' than 'dislikes'). This 2nd place logo, the in- to no avail. Athelstan did write up his mini-lesson, which tersecting planes design by Jamie Bechtel, apparently will be a centerpiece of the electronic material to be suffered some vote loss from being hand-drawn compared to distributed; we hope this will be finalized for publication Guy's polished computer-generated images. (Almost all with JL15. Thereafter, all non-paying people above level 0 negative votes on this design also voted against all other will have to demonstrate their interest by attempting to hand-drawn designs.) As a result, we intend to try this complete the exercises in the mini-lesson. 11 There has been considerable debate about the extent of financial and political quagmire that nearly killed Loglan things to be distributed. Ju'i Lobypli issues and the in the 1980's before Bob and others started the Lojban textbook are nearly impossible to put on-line, even with a effort. file server, because so much of the text is formatted and Now we've again caught the interest of the academic relies on greater than 80-column lines. This issue, for community, and are taking measures to ensure that example, is over 400K bytes of data. We are also reluctant Loglan/Lojban is taken seriously and treated with respect. to post non-baselined language description materials since This first sci.lang discussion was the critical milestone. we have no way to ensure that people eventually get updates In the special section on Lojban and Linguistics below, when the baseline occurs. Word lists, the machine grammar, John Cowan has done a superb effort at editing and the brochure, and Athelstan's mini-lesson are likely to be condensing the non-linear discussion into what seems like a available initially. I won't promise a date for an lively conversation, loaded with important ideas and electronic package because it is pretty much out of my detailed examples of Lojban. hands as long as the committee exists; it is likely that John then followed up this discussion by re-examining the the package will be available after LogFest in late June. old Zwicky review. While it is far too late to directly answer the critique in Language, John drafted a response to Computer Network - With help from John Cowan and Keith the key challenges posed by Zwicky, demonstrating that the Lynch and Eric Raymond (who supports lojban-list and John's Lojban design fully meets Zwicky's challenge. This and Bob's computer accounts), Lojban has been highly response is also printed in the special section below, and visible on the UNIX-oriented Usenet/Internet computer will shortly be posted to sci.lang. network, providing us with worldwide communications with The second discussion stemmed from a comparative our supporters, and highly successful recruiting. We have discussion of artificial languages, concentrating on been especially visible in an electronic news/discussion Esperanto and Ido. Nick Nicholas, an Australian group called "sci.lang", which is a major focus for Esperantist, posted a Suzanne Vega song translated into linguistics professionals, researchers, and students, several artificial languages (later added to by Ivan worldwide. In particular, Lojban has come up as the Derzhanski), whereupon Bob joined in with a Lojban version. principal topic of discussion during two periods of several These translations, and some associated discussion, appear weeks during the last 6 months. (Discussions in these in le lojbo se ciska in this issue. A few of the Lojban- groups tend to flow from topic to topic forming a highly related postings are also included, with more planned for intertwined set of 'threads of discussion', which next issue (since the discussion continues). eventually fade out as people turn to new topics that have We received several compliments for our direct support of caught their attention. Thus, Lojban has been mentioned discussions on the network. Loglan continues its trend as several times in connection with several topics, but the being the first 'successful' artificial language to have 'thread' caught people's attention twice in particular.) its development process openly observed and participated in In the first instance, Lojban (and Loglan in general) by the academic community. came up as a result of a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf Hy- Both network discussions were quite productive in terms pothesis. John Cowan stepped into the discussion, and then of recruiting - we've added over 50 people as a result. Bob 'weighed in' in response to some fairly critical Nick (a Greek native) and Ivan (a Bulgarian native) have challenges from linguists. Much to our pleasure, Lojban both expressed interest in learning Lojban; Nick has withstood this first challenge from the linguistic academic expressed especial interest in joining our growing group of community, gaining respect from several people and a will- Lojban poets. ingness on their part to see how the project develops scientifically. ApaLingua, Tand and Factsheet Five - Lojban continues to Given the disastrous history of Loglan's relationship appear on occasion in the amateur and alternative press. with the academic community, this was welcome indeed. Mike Gunderloy reviews each of our issues in Factsheet While attracting interest from several linguistic academics Five, and a recent issue (incidentally the first one to in the 1960's, the first publication of Loglan 1 drew a mention Institute publications) gave us our largest crop of critical review from Professor Arnold Zwicky, in a 1969 is- new Lojbanists yet, over a dozen. This, coupled with the sue of Language, one of the foremost linguistics journals. sci.lang discussions and our continuing word-of-mouth While this review was a friendly, constructive critique spread led to almost 1 new person per day throughout the (this intent was confirmed in a recent letter exchange first two months of 1991. between Bob and Dr. Zwicky, now a leader in the field of An amateur publication on linguistics, a sort of printed language typology), Dr. Brown apparently took its sci.lang, has been started, and several Lojbanists are challenges as highly negative. among the participants. ApaLingua is published bi-monthly, For whatever reason, the review went unanswered, and and consists of several pages written and submitted by each Loglan has suffered for 20 years as a result. The of the subscribers. Like the computer networks, each per- Institute's attempts to get funding from the National son poses new topics for discussion and responds to the Science Foundation were rejected, with several peer writings of others. There were over 30 contributors at the reviewers citing the unanswered critique. Dr. Brown time of the sample issue Bob received in November, and it eventually gave up on the academic community and tried to was clear that the group would be expanding rapidly. la "go commercial", a disaster that led in turn to the lojbangirz. intends to participate in ApaLingua, but at 12 this point Bob has had too many irons in the fire, and has 3rd issue, appearing after JL13, included a lot of reader committed to making substantial progress on the textbook feedback, some positive and more negative. We've pretty before adding this one. much decided to see where these discussions lead before Tand, another amateur publication has had discussions of responding further. Tand comes out infrequently, and the Lojban for the last 3 issues. The type of comments being raised are best answered by people looking at our publications to avoid our repeating (to editor Mark Manning's great distaste) large quantities of the same type of thing that appears here in JL. Evecon and Arisia - la lojbangirz. participated in this year's edition of Evecon, the largest science fiction convention here in the Washington DC area. Bob, Nora, and Athelstan gave several talks during the New Years weekend, and staffed a booth that provided information about Lojban. Meanwhile, Coranth D'Gryphon attended Arisia, a February Boston area science fiction convention. Several new people signed up, making it the most successful convention recruiting effort yet among those not attended by Bob and Nora. Coranth is planning to follow this effort up with a class this spring taught through an MIT extension program. GURT - Bob and Athelstan are planning to attend the Georgetown University Round Table of Linguistics, an annual event of significant stature in the linguistics community. A focus of this year's meetings, the first week of April, is on language acquisition and education. We are planning to use these meetings to expand our contacts with members of the linguistic community, and move towards an examination by that community of the potential value for Lojban in linguistic research and language education. Another Trip: Will This One Happen? - Bob and Nora have been promising themselves a trip to California for two years now (Bob grew up in the San Francisco area), but it always seemed to be another 2 months away; there always seemed to be another deadline. THIS time we're a bit more optimistic, and are planning a late April trip to the Bay Area. We'll probably be able to come for a week and associated weekends. This one should really come off, since Nora's boss is encouraging her to take an April vacation. Occasional considerations of a side trip to Los Angeles and San Diego are being set aside; too many trips have been cancelled because of excess ambition (and Nora needs a REAL vacation). Our intent is to give several talks on Lojban while there, both to existing Lojbanists and to potential recruits. We want to meet as many of you as possible, so try to set aside a little time for us. We badly need volunteers to help us organize these meetings, and provide or locate places we can get together. Call Bob immediately - (703) 385-0273 - if you can help, given the short time frame. We will try to put out a notice by mail a week or two ahead of time indicating our itinerary. Since Bob has sisters in the Santa Cruz and mid-Peninsula areas, and close friends in Berkeley, these are definite stops for at least a night or two each. Athelstan Finally Makes a Trip - After two trips in two years being cancelled at the last minute, Athelstan says he will not promise trips in advance again. As a result (so 13 he suspects), things finally started going right. After who have never responded, we must hear from you by the next over a year and a half with one car problem after another, issue of JL in early May, or you will be dropped to level he got his car mobile enough to make it out of the DC area. '0'. If you have responded, but not in the past year, we Indeed, he made it all the way to Salt Lake City, where he still want to hear from you, but can allow you support down stayed a couple weeks with Lojbanist Diane Lehmann and got to US$-50 before taking action to cut our losses. If your her started learning the language. (He then rebuilt his balance is below US$-50, we need to hear from you by the car as he drove home, having packed a spare part for next JL issue, at minimum, to keep sending at this level. everything and finding he needed most of those spares. Ideally, as many as possible will send some money, even ba'u) if not enough to fully cover our costs. We're doing our best to subsidize non-US Lojbanists, but we need your help. Press Release - In February, following the legal victory Please respond. discussed under Institute News below, la lojbangirz. put out its first press release. This news release, a copy of Non-English Materials - We now have French, Italian, and which appears after this news section, went to over 300 Esperanto translations of the "What is Lojban? la lojban. members of the business and scientific press. The response mo" brochure. The latter two are still only in the thus far has been small, but with the world situation as roughest of drafts, not even correctly typed in. We need lively as it has been, we wouldn't expect to be an volunteers to work with our translations, to polish them, immediate priority. Also, since each response is likely to to put them into computerized formats, and to add to the turn into a news or magazine story, a few responses will go list of languages. a long way. News From the Institute International News Trademark - The most significant news regarding The Canadian checks OK - After having three of them make it Loglan Institute, Inc. is that la lojbangirz. has won its through our bank with no problem and no service charge, I challenge of TLI's trademark registration of the name am happy to tell our Canadian friends that we can accept 'Loglan'. The decision was rendered in 'summary checks in Canadian currency if it is difficult or expensive judgement'; the issues were sufficiently clear-cut that to get US currency checks. We deposit the check, and the there was no need for a trial. Following are excerpts from bank then adjusts the deposit for the exchange rate about a the decision. la lojbangirz. is 'Petitioner' and The In- week later, which seems to be within a few cents of the stitute is 'Respondent': standard rate. Remember that for other countries, we can accept a check on your non-US bank in your currency, but there is a service charge of US$3.50. We can also accept Master Card and Visa balance contributions with a service charge of 6%. Athelstan's European trip aborted - In JL13, we reported that there were last minute problems threatening to cancel Athelstan's planned trip to the Netherlands World Science Fiction convention, and then around several countries of Europe. The problems continued to grow, and Athelstan's then-dead car made it impossible for him to get around and solve them. So he didn't go. We are still hoping to have some Lojbanist make it to Europe in the next couple of years, but I think we're going to avoid promises until there is something definite. Non-North American Lojbanists and the Fund-raising Drive - The November fund raising letter did not go to our overseas friends. Except for US and Canada subscribers, the postage cost was too high for the potential gain. Instead, we are sending those people who were on the list in November a somewhat modified form of the letter, representing the slightly different circumstances and our more liberal policy in support of non-North American Lojbanists. Note that balances reflected in the letters do not include the price of this issue. Simply put, for those JL subscribers with balances (in November when the letters were prepared) less than US$-30 14 "The facts of record clearly establish petitioner's port the decision were provided by The Institute on its genuine interest in the subject matter of the proceeding own, possible bases for appeal are minimal. and support a reasonable belief that petitioner will be We thus consider the legal cloud on the language to be damaged by the continued existence of the registration lifted. Threats of legal action by The Institute, sought to be cancelled..." originally against Bob and Jeff Prothero (before la "...both respondent and petitioner have filed documents lojbangirz. was incorporated), have been retracted or evidencing use of the term LOGLAN as the generic name or rendered invalid through this decision. People can use the the common descriptive name of a language developed by Dr. name Loglan public-ally without fear of legal challenge; James Cooke Brown. Even Dr. Brown uses the term as the our success should cause TLI to have second thoughts before name of the language... There is apparently a community of engaging in further legal harassment. The legal action was persons interested in the development of the language who expensive (we intend NOT to pursue TLI for reimbursement of have conducted very active communications with one another legal expenses, in the interest of ending the dispute), and and without exception they use the term Loglan to refer to it certainly has distracted Bob and others from more useful the language, not as a trademark for the grammars and endeavors on behalf of the language (Bob may have put as dictionaries which contain the words that make up, and much as 6 man-months into legal-related research that could information pertaining to, the construction of the have gone into textbook writing). language. ... In addition to the foregoing, we note that The battle is over. It is time to move ahead, and to the Acronyms, Initialisms & Abbreviations Dictionary Ninth settle the war. Bob has written to Dr. Brown, proposing a Edition, 1985-1986, lists the term, "loglan" and defines it settlement between our two efforts that would result in as "logical language" ... unity of the Loglan Project behind a Lojban recognized by "... the evidence indicates that it was not until 1985 Brown as a legitimate version of Loglan. The offer that respondent first expressed the view that LOGLAN was includes generous incentives towards unity that will en- its trademark. ... Prior to that time, the term was used by hance Dr. Brown's influence and stature in the community, Dr. Brown, respondent and others simply as the designation and aid TLI in performing the Loglan research for which it for the developing language, although it is reasonable to was originally founded. la lojbangirz. would be the conclude that Dr. Brown and the Institute may have principal interface with the community and the world, mistakenly believed that such use by others was with working to gain acceptance and support for the language. recognition of their purported proprietary rights. If accepted, Loglan would become the first major artificial "In view of the foregoing, it is our opinion that LOGLAN, language project to mend a split, giving us added being a generic term, does not function as a trademark for credibility in convincing the world of Loglan's value. In respondent's goods. addition, our combined resources would get more and better "... petitioner's motion for summary judgement ... is quality work accomplished in less time. granted as to the issue of the generic nature of the term We ask readers who have also supported The Institute to LOGLAN. The petition for cancellation is granted and the write to Dr. Brown and encourage him to move towards such a registration will be cancelled in due course." settlement. We had filed on several other grounds, including JCB's finances, TLI Fund-Raiser Fails - As a footnote to fraudulent filing of the application for the trademark due the legal decision, Dr. Brown reported in his latest Lognet to the several false statements therein and abandonment newsletter that he suffered a serious personal financial through failure to continually use the term as a trademark. setback. As a result, he no longer can financially support The fraud claim was denied because we did not prove "fraud- The Institute. Indeed, he had to take a large portion of ulent misconduct accompanied by some element of willfulness the Institute's recent income to pay himself back in or bad faith". The abandonment claim was declared moot preference to using that money to further promote his since the term wasn't a valid trademark in the first place. version of the language. Lest there be any doubt, I/we have nothing personal This setback was coupled with a fund raising drive that against Dr. Brown. Indeed, we honor his genius in creating coincidentally occurred at about the same time as our own. the language. We believe his policies have been mistaken Dr. Brown sought donations sufficient to pay for another and have as a result stultified the progress of the Scientific American advertisement, a cost of $3500. language, but this assertion didn't need a legal battle to Apparently, less than half that amount was raised. This is be resolved. One only needs to observe the astounding probably a good thing for TLI, since Dr. Brown projected a relative success la lojbangirz. has had in promoting Loj- gain of perhaps 150 new people from this advertising, an ban, which IS Loglan in every sense of the word, through expense of over $20 per person - as much as the price of our more liberal policies. (During the last three years, the book he is selling. we have outgrown the Institute by a large measure in spite We note that several of the large donors Dr. Brown listed of the republication of Loglan 1 by TLI and several contributed comparable amounts in our own fund raising thousand dollars in advertising by TLI.) drive. We did raise the $3500 and more in our effort, and The Institute can appeal the trademark decision, but such are putting it towards producing more and better appeals historically have been considered frivolous, unless information about the language. Bob and Nora, and other buoyed by significant new evidence. Since this decision major contributors, have made donations rather than loans. was based on a matter of law, and sufficient facts to sup- As a result, la lojbangirz. is relatively debt-free (we 15 technically owe our subscribers their balances, and Bob, This is probably all that can really be done at this Nora, and Jeff Prothero have pledged donations against the point. Until we have a community of fluent speakers, legal debt). Dr. Brown meanwhile claims an enormous Lojban will lack credibility among professionals in several financial debt from the Institute (over $35,000 prior to la of the interest areas. Moreover, we will have trouble lojbangirz.'s founding). raising funds through grants and contracts that would greatly advance our capabilities in these areas. TL to be revived? - The Institute has been trying to Still, it is worthwhile to have a brief review of each improve on its accomplishments. Several months ago, it area. Following is a summary, from Bob's perspective, of announced that The Loglanist, its old journal somewhat each area: comparable to Ju'i Lobypli, was going to be revived under a new name starting in December 1990. This didn't happen. A The Language Development Process - Of course, we have specific editor was named in the first 1991 LogNet, but we reported on specific achievements in the language have no further word on what is planned. development as they have occurred. In JL13, we surveyed where the language development process stood with regard to Another Major Revision to Institute Loglan? - We have individual areas of the design. There is a broader mentioned previously (and lambasted) a proposal to devise a picture, though, that might be missed in looking too series of 'declensions' for each gismu in Institute Loglan. closely. Arguments in favor and opposing this revision have Loglan has been the most public language development appeared in each issue of Lognet for the past year, with project in terms of public knowledge of the decisions being Dr. Brown sounding alternatively supportive and skeptical made and input into the decision-making itself. Indeed, it of the proposal; Bob McIvor, who proposed it, is the other was this public involvement that led to the big political member of 'The Loglan Academy' that approves changes to squabbles of the last decade. People who have been Institute Loglan. Dr. Brown has indicated that a decision involved in the language development feel that the language is expected this spring. is theirs. Interestingly, Dr. Brown claims that the Loglan A side-effect of such a political dispute has been quite engineering effort is complete, even while contemplating positive; we have pretty much isolated the politics of the such major changes as this one. "movement" from the language development process itself. The community understands that it is listened to by those Shareware? - The last issue of TLI's Lognet surprised Bob who make day-to-day design decisions. This has allowed the with a minor note in response to a letter. The letter process to proceed by consensus; there have been few non- suggested that TLI software be distributed as 'Shareware', unanimous decisions during the development process. and Dr. Brown indicated that the idea would be considered. Ideas and proposals are talked out thoroughly if Bob's and Nora's intention to distribute LogFlash as Share- proposed. A recent discussion of relativistic tenses on ware triggered the intellectual property disputes that the computer mailing list overflowed every reader's mailbox caused the current rift. While Shareware software can with dozens of pages of discussion. The discussion technically preserve copyrights, it causes those copyrights continues, and is far from a consensus; no change is being to be of minimal financial value, since Shareware is freely made. Meanwhile, the several dozen minor cmavo changes and copyable. Is The Institute about to make a landmark change grammar changes have so far attracted minimal comment (and in its policy? We'll be watching. they can hardly be more abstruse than the interaction of light-cones at relativistic speeds). They are expected to be adopted by consensus. A Survey of Lojban Applications The extent of the Loglan development process has had a second effect, also a benefit. There have been few Last issue, we gave a rather thorough progress report on splinter efforts. Lojban itself is one; the splinter has the language development progress, and we provide updates become the mainstream. The Institute version of the on that status each issue. A couple of people have pointed language is ever-changing, and drawing small numbers in out that we haven't provided comparable information on spite of massive advertising and a completed book. Jim other aspects of the language - how Loglan/Lojban will be Carter's language project remains essentially a one-person used. On our registration forms, we ask you to indicate effort, and Jim himself remains a Lojban supporter. one or more of several reasons for your interest in the Meanwhile la lojbangirz. grows at an ever-accelerating language, and we have been remiss in not addressing those rate. areas directly in these pages. An effect of the dozens of person-years of work put into There is a reason for this, of course. Nearly all of the Loglan/Lojban is that it has become a new standard in productive work being done is going towards the language artificial language development. Most previous artificial development process. That phase is wrapping up, and people languages have been predominantly the result of one are slowly starting to use the language. As a result we person's work. But, now, no individual language inventor can expect the other areas of interest to flower as more can hope to put as much work into a language design as we people learn the language. Meanwhile, we try to focus on all have. Barring some major new insight into the nature the other areas one at a time, to keep people thinking of language, any future language development project hoping about them. to improve upon Lojban would likely require several people 16 working together, and most likely will build on the work we ideas, the language, the contacts, and hopefully the and others have done rather than start anew. credibility, to convince some research grant source to I believe that this is as it should be. The Library of commit a large sum of money to pursue these applications. Congress has dozens of books about one-man languages that Until then, we need to exchange ideas. Patrick Juola never went anywhere. Language is by its nature a commu- wrote on Lojban and machine translation back in JL8, and nicative process between people with varying experience. JL9 discussed the closely related area of Lojban as a One person cannot simultaneously test speakability and mathematics and science interlingua. Sheldon Linker has understandability, and viable languages must exhibit both thought about the design of a heuristic learning and con- virtues across the full range of human discourse. versation program (something like the HAL 9000 computer of A final aspect of the publicness of the language 2001 - A Space Odyssey). Art Wieners has been pursuing development is the emphasis on keeping a record of what we similar ideas, and has done experimental work on the have done. An enormous archive is being built and software needed to recognize Lojban words. Of course, the maintained on this development effort. Whether any YACC grammar for Lojban enhances this line of research, and particular version of Loglan survives and prospers, those John Cowan's parser, coupled with Jeff Taylor and Jeff who come later will see what we have done and be able to Prothero's earlier work, may provide the capability to go learn from it. Among artificial languages, only Esperanto from individual speech sounds (phonemes) to fully analyzed has any significant historical record of the language text structure within a few months. before it blossomed into public knowledge, and that record One area we would like to pursue is the current research is sparse compared to the Loglan/Lojban record. being done in teaching computers 'common-sense'. Some The other feature of the language development process researchers are not too far from getting computers to worthy of comment is our reliance on keeping abreast of the understand a large subset of English. The simpler, more field of linguistics, gathering as much information is regular grammar of Lojban should make the computer possible on what has been learned about human language processing for language structure much lighter, allowing before claiming to have invented a language that can serve more effort to go into 'understanding' of language. as a human language. This serves us well in 'selling Bob, as editor of Ju'i Lobypli, would like to encourage Lojban' to both language learners and linguistics more computer scientists to write brief outlines of their researchers, making the other goals of the language more ideas for Lojban for the benefit of JL readers. These achievable. seeds, planted today, may become grant proposals tomorrow. Machine Translation and Computer Applications - The major International Language - JL11 and JL13 have contained bases of computer scientists' interest in Lojban stem from significant discussion of the oft-made comparisons between the potential computer applications of the language, of Loglan and Esperanto, and this issue hopefully brings those which machine translation of natural language is the most discussions to a conclusion. As the computer network well-known. A large portion of the Lojban community, discussions excerpted later in this issue demonstrate, the perhaps as much as 50%, are people working in the broad topic has not been limited to this journal. The topic has area of computer science, if not specifically in artificial been thoroughly addressed, but let's summarize the key intelligence, computer language design, machine elements of the situation. translation, or any of the several fields where Lojban I will first cover the question of Lojban as an common applications may develop. language in certain specialized domains, such as Work on these applications is still predominantly at the mathematics, international law, etc. The arguments with concept stage, for two major reasons. First is that the Esperantists in these pages and elsewhere have not language development is not fully baselined, and computer addressed these questions. Each language brings its own application developers avoid as much as possible trying to advantages to the problem. Esperanto brings its culture, hit a moving target. When that baseline occurs, and if the demonstrated speaker base, and (surprisingly as an language has achieved credibility as a human language, the 'advantage') its European structure and vocabulary. When second obstacle can be challenged. That obstacle is, of well over 90% of the published material in the world is course, money. Most useful computer applications will take written in a European language, and most of that in several person-years of development, requiring work from English, Loglan's non-European grammar is NOT an advantage. people used to fairly high salaries. Some might work on Loglan's advantages are that its grammar is unambiguous, small efforts as a hobby, but we cannot expect these that machine translation was considered in making design efforts to bear fruit, though they might serve as a seed decisions, and that it is likely to be seen less as a for some future effort. "colonial" (=European) language to Third World populations. Getting the first financial support for Loglan It isn't clear what parameters could be used to decide applications will be difficult; Dr. Brown made one brief what "international language" is "best". Esperanto has a attempt in the late 1970's that was ignored. la large number of speakers, an established community, lojbangirz. is taking a more systematic approach, building culture, and literature, and considerable recognition credibility and being aware of other research where Lojban outside its own speaker base as "the" international may prove a useful adjunct. We also have been building language. On the other hand, many Esperantists admit that awareness of our effort in the computer science community. the language has flaws, and that other languages invented When Lojban development is complete, we will have the since have remedied some of these flaws (usually while 17 introducing new ones that are equally severe); they contend into Esperanto or Lojban and it would still convey however, that the entire set of flaws in the language are misleading ideas - you cannot translate idiom literally more than made up by the 100 years of language experience without error. You may not be able to translate non-idiom that has been acquired. literally, either - imagine the misunderstanding of an I, Bob, agree with this position. Esperanto is presently translation that results in using the traditional meaning in good standing as the prime candidate among artificial of "gay". languages. Under the best of circumstances for us, Lojban will not legitimately contest this standing for at least a Let us say that it is agreed that there will be an generation, because it will take at least that long for international language (not as universally agreed as many Lojban to build a literature, culture, etc. It may not enthusiasts might want to believe), the language must be happen even then. chosen. Then the method(s) of teaching the language must It remains to be proven whether any artificial language, be developed, methods on a scale large enough to overcome or any single language at all can serve the needs of a differences of education, and access to materials. If only "world language". I doubt that most people really know the most educated members of a society are taught to speak what such a language would entail. Those who raise the an international language, the only "achievement" is a claim of English as such a language, for example, forget class system with walls virtually impossible to surmount. that English is not a single language. Only in rigid, (Of course, motivating a farmer who never runs into formal, written text like scientific writing is there foreigners to learn an international language may be enough standardization that various English dialects are difficult. But if she/he doesn't learn the language, mutually intelligible to the degree required by an his/her children will be severely handicapped in joining "international language". I can note that, even there, one the internationally-connected 'upper-class'.) can find lapses. Last year, I read a technical book on If a language is chosen, it should probably be an lexicography, the science of dictionary-making, written by artificial one, and Esperanto is by far the leading a Czech linguist under the auspices of the United Nations, candidate. Indeed, with the exception of Lojban (which has and translated with his help into English. Portions were major goals independent of the international language only barely intelligible. Yet it was clear that the author question to drive it), there are no other meaningful did have considerable command of idiomatic English, and candidates. The other artificial languages of the world Czech is a European language, presumably closer to English simply do not offer anything to justify their selection. than most non-European ones. And this was written by a Why? Because other candidates have little to offer linguist who specializes in writing dictionaries of other besides some aesthetic purity of design, and a purported languages, and therefore highly aware of the difficulties claim that they are 'easier to learn' than Esperanto. in international communication. But questions of which artificial language is most "easy I contend that colloquial or conversational communication to learn" are red herrings that settle nothing. Indeed, will be much more difficult to unify under the auspices of close examination tends to reveal that artificial languages an 'international language'. This is because the problem theoretically are no easier to learn than natural languages is NOT a lack of a common language, but a lack of educa- - I've heard no claim that the few children who are Es- tion. Education starts with the ability to read and write peranto 'native speakers' because they are raised in a your own native language fluently - who could justify household where Esperanto is spoken, learn their language asking someone to learn to read a second language when they any faster than an English-native speaker learns English. cannot read their own - and how would you teach them. But For second-language learning, too much depends on student a large portion of the world's population, probably a background, motivation, and method. There are as many majority, is totally illiterate, and others are only semi- theories of the "best" way to teach a language as there are literate. How dare we as Loglanists expect to teach them researchers; yet they give approximately similar results predicate logic or even relativistic tenses! when tested against real students. How could non-spe- It isn't necessary to learn to read and write in order to cialists be better able to judge fine distinctions as to learn a language, but all international language proposals which language is easier to teach, or to learn? have been predominantly targeted at the educated speaker, The methodology and the goal are more important than the and teaching materials and methods generally require language. Esperanto vocabulary may be easier for an ability to read and write as well as some understanding English speaker to learn, but if this merely leads to about the formal rules of your native language. English-native Esperantists that speak an encoded English I do not damn the illiterate. The supposedly literate idiom, why bother? They have not learned an international societies are just as bad as targets for an international language, because non-English speakers will fail to under- language. How much of the recent turmoil in the Middle stand the idiom. (When Lojbanists speak encoded idiom, it East has been due to the fact that Westerners, especially stands out so starkly that "malglico" is one of the first Americans, do not understand Arabic culture, much less the words a practicing Lojbanist learns.) Arabic language? The journalists seemed to consider it a A quote from Andrew Large's The Artificial Language major discovery that "mother of all battles", conveyed to Movement may help set a perspective. Large cites a us as a grandiose pomposity by Saddam Hussein, was merely President of the international Esperanto organization UEA, the literal English translation of a rather natural Arabic as giving the following as an estimate of Esperanto's ease way of saying "big battle". Translate the phrase literally of learning: 18 who also are fluent in other languages in order to get "... Professor Lapenna offered a reasonable estimate of these materials. (Silvia Romanelli reported working on two or three hours per week for a year in order to acquire translating the draft textbook lessons into Italian a year "a solid groundwork of knowledge of Esperanto's grammatical ago, but we do not know her current status.) structure and of five hundred or so selected roots, from Esperanto is likely to be the first non-English language which the language's agglutinative structure enables one to that we have substantial Lojban teaching materials in, derive some five thousand words." simply because it is the most commonly spoken non-English language in the community (and the largest audience of This sounds far easier than learning a natural language people immediately likely to be interested in learning an- (about the equivalent of a 1 semester, 3 credit class, other artificial language for any purpose). spread over a full year), but the comparison with natural The politics of choosing an international language favor language is only relevant if someone is choosing between Esperanto, or even English, by far over Lojban. There is learning a second natural language and Esperanto. The little to be done in this arena other than to survive and choice is seldom that simple - except for mandatory school grow as a language. This takes speakers and money, and for requirements, most people learn a language because they the near future we will have to concentrate on English intend to use it. People who seriously study a second speakers, while trying to constantly reach out to natives natural language spend far more than a couple hours a week of other languages. The English-speaking market is the in study for a year (or longer) if they want to achieve hardest one though; English predominance as an competence in that language; Lapenna's estimate is only a international means of communication means that there is hobbyist level-of-effort. lower motivation among English speakers to learn other Serious students with serious goals in language languages - and motivation and effort, as I said above, are competence study much more intensely, and achieve much everything. Even Esperanto has made few inroads in the better results than Lapenna claims. I learned the Lojban English-speaking market (ELNA, the North American Esperanto gismu list, 1300 words easily giving millions if not organization, has only around 1000 members, only a few billions of agglutinative compounds, in 3 months of a bit times the effective size of la lojbangirz.) la lojbangirz. more than an hour a day - perhaps half of Lapenna's total can gain enormous credibility if we can motivate Americans time estimate at twice the intensity - yet I don't claim and other English-speakers to learn a candidate the Lojban vocabulary is as easy to learn for English international language. We have an advantage, being speakers as Esperanto's cognates. The advantage was due to centered in the United States, and should use that more intense effort, interest, and a teaching method advantage. especially effective at vocabulary instruction. (At such a It won't be easy, though. Most Americans never learn to higher level of effort, Esperanto students might learn a speak a foreign language at even a minimal level few more roots due to the cognate recognition factor, but (Europeans, including the British are apparently much not all that many more.) better in this regard; Canadians are almost certainly On the other hand, if the claim is that Esperanto, or any exposed to French to some considerable degree; I have no artificial language, is easier to learn than a natural knowledge of foreign language education in other English- language at a hobbyist level of effort, I would never speaking countries). If a Southern Californian (I lived contest this. But that level of effort gives insufficient there 9 years), faced with almost a majority of native rewards in terms of achievement and understanding to Spanish-speaking neighbors, can avoid learning Spanish sustain the motivation of the average person. fluently, much less minimally, what will make her/him learn I'll claim, by the way, that vocabulary learning is the Lojban. It won't be ease of learning. It must be major factor in achieving the kind of language skill motivation and education. People must come to believe that Lapenna is talking about, at least in an artificial understanding the ideas of those of different cultures is language. Elsewhere in the same discussion, Large notes important. that a few hours of study are all that it takes to understand the basics of Esperanto's grammar. We can make The international language movement must be a movement of the same claim about Lojban. But grammar is not the education. Lojban's contribution to that movement will critical factor. (In natural languages, it is idiom, and therefore not be as a competitor with Esperanto, but as a other exceptions to the standard grammar, that makes a tool of education, used in cooperation with Esperantists, language time consuming to master.) and all others who seek to improve the world's lot through education. Returning specifically to Lojban, as an international language candidate. The essential first requirement is Intercultural Communications/Studies - This is often the that Lojban be demonstrated as truly viable as a language, goal of those supporting international languages: a means among several different native-language populations. This to understand other cultures. Ease of learning is not the will not be easy. Lojban is not yet spoken by any non-na- most important factor here, cultural neutrality is far more tive-English speaker, and the few in that category that are important. studying the language must obviously know English to learn I've put a lot of effort during the last year to ensure Lojban, since we have no materials beyond our brochure in that Lojban has incorporated the means to express the ideas any foreign language. We must develop fluent Lojbanists of different cultures with equal ease. Language typology, 19 the study of universals that all languages have in common, minimize the effect of interruption or lesser time spent, and the differences that make each language unique, is a but the bottom line is that the method requires a study that is finally gaining significant progress. From commitment to regular use - it takes a certain number of this work, we can see what linguistic features Lojban needs hours to learn a certain amount of vocabulary. Someone who to succeed as a language, and what features it must emulate doesn't spend that time, regularly for 3 months, will have in order to successfully model other languages. less success. People who need a variety of activities to In particular, I've concentrated on a book, The World's maintain their interest may find LogFlash's monotonous, if Major Languages, edited by B. Comrie. This book surveys effective, drills beyond their tolerance (unless they spend several dozen languages in considerable detail, both additional time above and beyond LogFlash study in other European and non-European. After 6 months of steady Lojbanic activities). plowing, I can report that Lojban has the capability of Lojban, however, offers an excellent laboratory for conveying the essence of each of the idiosyncratic experimenting with new methods in language education, and structures I found, though sometimes in unusual ways. For the techniques we have developed as amateurs have already example, the 'topic construction' of Japanese turns out to proven effective for people trying to learn other be nicely modelled by Lojban's prenex construction, languages. Darren Stalder, now studying Japanese, reports designed for certain logical expressions. The Chinese that studying Lojban gave him an awareness of the lin- sentences used as examples can often be conveyed in Lojban guistic features of how words sound (phonology) that has as very elaborate tanru. It is clear to me that, if the greatly enhanced his learning of Japanese. He understands Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is true, then Lojban's ability to the rules for pronouncing the language, but also better model the structures of the world's languages will lead to understands why the rules hold, allowing him to better a corresponding ability to understand the cultures that use remember the rules when they apply as well as to extrapo- those languages. Time will surely tell. late when the rules do not explicitly cover the situation. Lojban's value in understanding other cultures is Sylvia Rutiser has also been working with Japanese, trying enhanced by the requirement to thoroughly think about what to use the LogFlash flash card techniques to learn the you wish to say in culture-free terms in order to express Japanese writing system. it in Lojban, with its drastically different structures. I personally think that language education may be one of The translations of a Suzanne Vega song lyric into several the areas where Lojban first scores a breakthrough that artificial languages in le lojbo se ciska, and my attracts attention from those not directly interested in commentary, may be more revealing than a lot of words here. the language itself. When the textbook is complete, I will It took me a couple of hours to do the Lojban translation, be seeking funding to pursue the study of Lojban as a tech- not because anything therein was hard to say in Lojban, but nique of language education. In the meantime, I'll be it took time to figure out just what the author was trying listening carefully at the relevant discussions at the to say (and I'm a native English speaker). Georgetown Round Table meetings on this subject in April. Expressing cultural ideas in Lojban for the benefit of those in other cultures, will be slow and at times Linguistics Research - Much of the rest of this issue cumbersome, especially for those not fluent in the addresses the subject of Lojban and the linguistics language. But the problem is not trivial, and a little community, so I won't spend much space here. As that deliberation may be a good sign rather than a bad one. discussion will show, the concept of using Lojban to study creolization processes (how languages evolve in contact Language Education - Half of language education for with other languages) is a new idea that should have natural languages (or even more) is understanding the significant credibility. Unlike a comparable study based culture of the target language, since so much of the on a natural language, studying the creolization of Lojban natural idiom of a language is tied to various cultural gains the benefit of a clear statement as to what the metaphors. Thus everything mentioned in the last section language is before the start of such an evolutionary provides a benefit for Lojban as a medium for learning process, thus allowing changes to be more easily observed other languages. and measured. I noted above that linguists have determined no optimal Most attention regarding Loglan linguistics research has method for teaching languages. A survey I've done of both been with regard to testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the traditional and innovative teaching methods indicates that original goal and primary ideal of some supporters of the each method has advantages and disadvantages; they will language. JL6 and JL7 discussed this topic considerably, work for some students and not for others. and there has been more discussion since then, including We have found the same thing with LogFlash, our superb some in the computer network material in this issue. vocabulary teaching method. Both Nora and I have learned However, a Sapir-Whorf test may take decades to plan and the Lojban vocabulary with what we saw as incredible ease, conduct, and may be unconvincing to some even if and more important, with incredible staying power - we successful. don't forget what we have learned. But the method requires Thus far more important to Lojban's future in linguistics the student to use the program for about 2-3 months at an research, and its credibility among linguists, is that hour a day, with major interruptions causing a significant Loglan/Lojban be proven useful for studying other aspects delay in mastery of the language. We're working on of language. We are lucky in this. Dr. Brown, in improvements with the next version of the program that will inventing the language, envisioned and designed it to serve 20 as a 'test bed' for language experimentation, having a Lojban is audio-visually isomorphic: the writing system minimum of features that might detract from the ability for has a grapheme for every phoneme and vice versa, and there later linguists to use Loglan as a tool to learn. We are no supra-segmental phonemes (such as tones or pitch) believe that the Lojban designers have stuck to this which are not represented in the writing system. Lojban's principle, and even enhanced it, in the last few years. phonology contains significant pauses that affect word What remains is to convince the linguists that we are boundaries, and allows pauses between any two words. The correct. optional written representation for pause is a period, Let us turn now to the first step in making the although pauses can be unambiguously identified in written linguistic case for Lojban, the response to Arnold Zwicky's text from the morphological rules alone. Lojban also uses 1969 critique of Loglan. We will then follow with other stress significantly, and again there is a written aspects of Lojban's application, especially as discussed on representation (capitalization of the affected vowel or the computer networks. syllable), which is omitted in most text, where the morphological default of penultimate stress applies. Lojban is morphologically unambiguous in two senses: a Response to Arnold Zwicky's 1969 Review of Loglan 1 string of phonemes (including explicit pause and stress Loglan and Lojban: A Linguist's Questions And An Amateur's information) can be broken up into words in only one way, Answers and each compound word can be converted to and from an by John Cowan (ci'a la djan. kau,n.) equivalent phrase in only one way. Internet address: [email protected] The syntactic unambiguity of Lojban has been established by the use of a LALR(1) parser generator which, in The following questions about Loglan are based on a 1969 cooperation with a series of simple pre-parser operations, review by Arnold M. Zwicky of James Cooke Brown's 1966 produces a unique parse for every Lojban text. In edition of Loglan 1. Although basically friendly, Zwicky's addition, the existence of a defined 'phrase structure review raises a large number of linguistic objections to rule' grammar underlying the language (and tested via the Loglan as it existed in 1966. The review represents the parser generator) guarantees that there are no sentences only formal notice the linguistics community has ever taken where distinct deep structures generate isomorphic surface of the Loglan Project. Unfortunately, the Project has structures. On the other hand, Lojban does have never made any reply. transformations, although they are not explicit in the The answers that appear here reflect the perspective of machine grammar: there are distinct surface structures Lojban (not Institute Loglan) as it exists in 1991. which have the same semantics, and therefore reflect the Therefore, no attempts have been made to sort out Zwicky's same underlying deep structure. misunderstandings of Brown's text, Brown's The claim for semantic unambiguity is a limited one only. misunderstandings (or mistakes in writing) about his own Lojban contains several constructs which are explicitly language, valid points as of 1969 that were later changed ambiguous semantically. The most important of these are by Brown, and valid points as of 1969 that were changed Lojban tanru (so-called 'metaphors') and Lojban names. when (or since) Lojban split from Institute Loglan. Names are ambiguous in almost any language, and Lojban is Throughout, "Loglan" refers to 1966 Loglan as seen by no better; a name simply must be resolved in context, and Zwicky, and "Lojban" to 1991 Lojban as seen by me. The the only final authority for the meaning of a name is the word "Lojban" is derived from the same metaphor as "Loglan" user of the name. tanru are further discussed in later ("logical language") but using Lojban words ("logji replies. bangu"). As the title indicates, I am only an amateur (lit. 2. If the meaning of a particular tanru cannot be "lover") of linguistics, and I may misinterpret some of completely understood from understanding the component Zwicky's points. The question-and-answer format used here parts, a separate dictionary entry is needed for every is purely for expository convenience. Zwicky is not possible tanru, making the Lojban dictionary infinitely responsible for the form of the questions, which reflect long. How can this be avoided? only my interpretations of his points, except for quoted text within the questions followed by (Z), which are tanru are binary combinations of predicates, such that quotations from Zwicky's original review. That review was the second predicate is the 'head' and the first predicate published in Language 45:2 (1969), pp. 444-457. is a modifier for that head. The meaning of the tanru is the meaning of its head, with the additional information 1. Lojban sentences do not have unique interpretations; that there is some unspecified relationship between the how can Lojban be said to be unambiguous? head and the modifier. tanru are the basis of compound words in Lojban. The sense in which Lojban is said to be unambiguous is However, a compound word has a single defined meaning not a simple one, and some amplification of the fundamental whereas the meaning of a tanru is explicitly ambiguous. claim is necessary. Ambiguity is judged on four levels: Lojban tanru are not as free as English figures of speech; the phonological-graphical, the morphological, the they are 'analytic', meaning that the components of the syntactic, and the semantic. tanru do not themselves assume a figurative sense. Only the connection between them is unstated. 21 Most of the constructs of Lojban are semantically originally select some words as 'semantic primitives'; unambiguous, and there are semantically unambiguous ways however, he later added words with no claim that the addi- (such as with relative clauses) to paraphrase the meaning tions were 'primitive' in the same sense). of any tanru. For example, "slasi mlatu" ("plastic-cat") might be paraphrased in ways that translate to "cat that is 4. Some tanru seem poorly designed and not in keeping with made from plastic" or "cat which eats plastic" or various expressed standards. Also, tanru like "nixli ckule", other interpretations, just as in English. However, the analogous to English "girls' school", are so open-ended in single (compound) word derived from this tanru, sense that there is no way to block such far-fetched "slasymlatu", has exactly one meaning from among the interpretations as "a school intended to train girls interpretations, which could be looked up in a dictionary between the ages of 6 and 10 to play the bassoon", which is (if someone had found the word useful enough to formally patently absurd. What is the proper interpretation of submit it). There is no law compelling the creation of tanru? such a word, however, and there is even an 'escape mechanism' allowing a speaker to indicate that a particular In the early part of the Loglan Project, poor tanru were instance of a 'nonce' compound word is 'nonstandard' (has regrettably common. In particular, it was common for tanru not been checked against a dictionary or other standard), to be calques on English expressions, such as "beautiful and may have a meaning based on an unusual interpretation type of small" for English "pretty small". Many tanru of the underlying tanru. employed the primitive for "make"' (in the sense "make from materials") where "cause" would have been more appropriate 3. The Loglan 'primitive words' seem to have been chosen (e.g. "kill" = "dead-make"). Many years worth of effort at random, without regard to any sort of semantic theory. since then have gone into removing such malglico Why was this done? ('derogatively English') tanru from Lojban texts. The Lojban tanru "nixli ckule" ("girl type of school") Lojban content words are built up from a list of about cannot mean, out of context, "school intended to train 1300 root words (called "gismu"), which are not necessarily girls between 6 and 10 years of age to play the bassoon", to be taken as semantically simple. Lojban does not claim although if such a school existed it could certainly be to exhibit a complete and comprehensive semantic theory called a nixli ckule. This interpretation can be rejected which hierarchically partitions the entire semantic space as implausible because it involves additional restrictive of human discourse. information. The undefined relationship between "nixli" Rather, the 1300-odd root words blanket semantic space, and "ckule" cannot drag in additional information 'by the in the sense that everything human beings talk about can be hair', as it were. Instead, this intricate interpretation built up using appropriate tanru. This claim is being would require a larger tanru incorporating nixli ckule as tested in actual usage, and root words can still be added one of its components, or else a non-tanru construct, if necessary (after careful consideration) if genuine gaps probably involving a Lojban relative clause. As a are found. For the most part, the few gaps which are now comparison, such interpretations as "school containing recognized (about 20 words will be added soon) reflect the girls", "school whose students are girls", and "school to completing of semantic sets. It is no longer permitted for train persons to behave like girls" are plausible with language users to create new gismu root words (in the minimal context because these renderings do not involve ad- standard form of the language, at least); newly coined ditional restriction. words must fall recognizably outside the highly regulated gismu morphological space (a specific and separate 5. Lojban claims to be unambiguous, but many constructs morphological structure is reserved for coined words - have vague meanings, and the meanings of the primitives usually borrowings - and a marker is available to indicate themselves are extremely poorly specified. On the other that a word is a 'nonce' coinage rather than an established hand, Lojban forces precision on speakers where it is not 'dictionary word'). wanted and where natural-language speakers can easily avoid Lojban's empirically derived word list is similar to that it. Is this appropriate to a culturally neutral, of Basic English, which replaces the whole English unambiguous language? vocabulary with English-normal compounds built from about 800 root words. Lojban and Basic English both allow for Lojban's avoidance of ambiguity does not mean an the adoption of technical terms from other languages to avoidance of vagueness. A Lojban aphorism states that the cover things like plant and animal names, food names, and price of infinite precision is infinite verbosity, as names of chemical compounds. indeed Wilkins' Philosophical Language illustrates. The unfortunate terms "primitive word" and "prim" Lojban's allowable vagueness permits useful sentences to be formerly used by the Loglan Project suggested the notion not much longer than their natural-language counterparts. that Lojban's set of gismu was meant to be a list of There are many ways to omit information in Lojban, and it semantic primitives. This is not the case for Lojban, and is up to the listener to reconstruct what was meant, just the more neutral term "root word" was adopted recently to as in natural languages. In each construct, there are reduce confusion. Lojban predicate words, therefore, are specific required and optional components. Unlike English, now divided into gismu 'root words', lujvo 'compound words' omitting an optional component explicitly and unambiguously and le'avla 'borrowings' (lit. 'taken words'). (Brown did flags an ellipsis. Furthermore, the listener has a clear 22 way of querying any of this elliptically omitted information. 7. Loglan anaphora use a convention which is "quite There are also some categories which are necessary in precise, and also quite unlike anything in natural Lojban and not in other languages. For example, Lojban languages" (Z), involving counting backward from the requires the speaker, whenever referring to objects, to reference to the referent. This provides unique reference, specify whether the objects are considered as individuals, but is also difficult to understand and use. Is there as a mass, or as a (set theoretic) set. Likewise, logical nothing better that preserves the desirable property of relations are made explicit: there can be no neutrality in unique reference which a logical language needs? Lojban about inclusive vs. exclusive 'or', which are no more closely related semantically than any other pair of The Lojban anaphora conventions have undergone much logical connectives. revision and expansion since the early days of Loglan. These properties are a product of Lojban's fundamental There now exist both the "traditional" Loglan back-counting design, which was chosen to emphasize a highly distinctive anaphora, which refer to previous referents, and more and non-natural syntax (that of formal first-order "natural-language-like" anaphoric words which are predicate logic) embedded in a language with the same meaningless until assigned. Assignment may be either in expressive power as natural languages. Through the after-thought or forethought. These words are somewhat appearance of this one highly unusual feature, the intent like natural language pronouns, but may more closely be of the Loglan Project has been to maximize one difference compared to the use of regions of space in American Sign between Lojban and natural languages without compromising Language to refer to remote persons and things. Unassigned speakability and learnability. This difference could then space regions in ASL are similarly meaningless. be tested by considering whether the use of first-order It is no longer a required convention that anaphora predicate logic as a syntactic base aided fluent Lojban variables be assigned in a fixed order. Subscripts (as in speakers in the use of this logic as a reasoning tool. mathematics) are allowed almost everywhere in the language, As to the 'primitives', Lojban gismu roots are defined and provide for a countable infinity of variables as of rather abstractly, in order to cover as large a segment of many other things. Lojban also has added the capability of closely related semantic space as possible. These broad using individual letters and acronyms as anaphoric symbols. (but not really vague) concepts can then be restricted using tanru and other constructs to any arbitrary degree 8. Why does Loglan have a different and even more complex necessary for clarity. Communicating the meaning of a system of "personal pronouns" for speaker/listener gismu (or any other Lojban word) is a problem of teaching reference? Is this level of complexity really in order for and lexicography. The concepts are defined as predicate what other languages treat as a simple matter? relationships among various arguments, and various experimental approaches have been explored throughout the Lojban personal pronouns have been simplified. There are Loglan Project to determine the best means to convey these now forms for I, II, III, I and II, I and III, II and III, meanings. It is believed that the current working and I and II and III. There are no separate forms (and definitions of the gismu are much more clear than the 1966 never have been) for plurals, because number is not a set. mandatory grammatical category in any part of Lojban. Number is expressed, when needed, using explicit numerals 6. On a more technical note, Lojban tanru involving more (which include both precise and vague forms analogous to than two components are always left-grouping (in the English 'some', 'few', 'too many', etc.) Honorifics were absence of a marker word). Right-branching structure is recently added to the language, using a general mechanism "much more natural to human languages" (Z). Why was this which may apply to any word or construct, not merely to choice made? pronouns. Lojban is predominantly a left-branching language. By 9. Why does Loglan treat predicate connection as primary default, all structures are left-branching, with right- and sentence, argument, etc. connection as secondary? branching available when marked by a particle. Since the head of most constructs appears on the left, left-branching Whatever may have been assumed in the past for structures tend to favor the speaker. Nothing spoken needs pedagogical purposes, logical connection between sentences to be revised to add more information. When the head is on is basic to Lojban. All other forms of logical connection the right, as in the case of tanru, left-branching may seem may be transformed into equivalent sentence connections. counter-intuitive, as it requires the listener to retain the entire structure in mind until the head is found. 10. Why are there so many structure words, and why are However, left-branching was retained even in tanru for the many of them so similar? Wouldn't this make Loglan hard to sake of simplicity. understand at a cocktail party (or a similar noisy Experience has shown, however, that Lojban's left- environment)? branching structure is not a major problem for language learners. Indeed, many longer English metaphors translate One of the recurrent difficulties with all forms of directly into Lojban using simple left-branching Loglan, including Lojban, is the tendency to fill up the structures. available space of structure words, making words of similar 23 function hard to distinguish in noisy environments. The phonological revisions made when Lojban split from Insti- The English sentence "If you water it, it will grow" tute Loglan allowed for many more structure words (cmavo), looks superficially like a Lojban "na.a" connection but once again the list has almost entirely filled. (material implication), but it actually has causal In some cases, notably the digits 0-9, an effort has been connotations not present in "na.a". Therefore, a proper made to separate them phonologically. The vocatives translation must involve the notion of cause. Neither the (including the words used for communication protocol, e.g. Lojban coordinating causal conjunction nor the two cor- over the radio) are also maximally separated relative subordinating causal conjunctions (one of which phonologically. Many other function words are based on subordinates the cause and the other the effect) will shortened forms of corresponding gismu roots, however, and serve, since these require that either the cause, or the are not maximally separated. effect, or both be asserted. Instead, the correct A variety of ways to say "Huh?" have been added to the translation of the English involves "cause" as a predicate, language, partially alleviating the difficulty. These and might be paraphrased "The event of your watering it is question words can be used to specify the type of word that a cause of the event of its future growing." was expected, or the part of the relationship that was not understood by the listener. 14. How can Loglan logical connectives be used in imperative sentences? Logical connectives work properly 11. Loglan's "restrictions on stresses and pauses results only on complete sentences, and of those, only those which in long sequences of unstressed syllables which must be actually assert something. pronounced without a break" (Z). This makes correct speech a "trial for a speaker of English or Russian, and not easy In early versions of Loglan, imperatives were marked by a even for a speaker of French" (Z). Natural languages often predication without a subject. In Lojban, there is a have non-significant pauses, but in Loglan every non- special imperative pronoun "ko". This is a second person required pause is forbidden. Is Loglan really speakable? pronoun logically equivalent to "do", the normal Lojban word for 'you', but conveying an imperative sense. Thus, Lojban allows certain flexibilities of pause and stress an imperative can be understood as commanding the listener in the area of structure words. By default, all structure to make the assertion true which results when "ko" is words are unstressed. However, it is possible to set off replaced by "do". structure words with optional pauses, and even to give them For example, "ko sisti" ('Stop!') is logically equivalent optional stress, subject to a single limitation: a to "do sisti" ('you stop'), and pragmatically may be structure word followed by a predicate word without pause understood as 'Make "do sisti" true!". This allows logical must not be stressed. connection to be used in imperatives without loss of Pauses are now permitted between any two words; only clarity or generality; the logical connection applies to within a word is pause forbidden, and most words are short. the assertion which is in effect embedded in the im- gismu and cmavo are always one or two syllables long, and perative. many lujvo compounds are only two or three syllables. A minor advantage of this style of imperative is that tensed imperatives like "ko ba klama", ('Come in-the- 12. "A partial explanation for the existence of future!') become straightforward. transformations is to be found in the necessity for providing speakers of any language with relatively 15. Loglan's existential (bound) variables appear to be acceptable variants of certain types of deep structures." non-standard. Brown states that the value of an (Z) Loglan has no transformations, making some sentences existential variable is always unknown to the speaker, expressible, but far from straightforward or easy to use. rather than merely being unspecified (perhaps for reasons Doesn't this make Loglan harder to use than typical natural of privacy or germaneness). Why is this? Also, why isn't languages? quantification over predicates provided? Why are the back- counting anaphora unable to refer to existential variables? Lojban does have transformations, in the sense that there are several alternative surface structures that have the Existential variables are now interpreted in a standard same semantics and therefore, presumably, the same deep way, to refer to something unspecified, or something structure. What it does not have is identical surface specified by a restrictive relative clause ("all x such structures with differing deep structures, so a surface- that..."). There are separate sets of variables for structure-only grammar is sufficient to develop an adequate quantifying over arguments and over predicates. In parsing for every text. Knowledge of transformations is general, the back-counting anaphora (which are less required only to get the semantics right. important in Lojban than in Loglan) are not used to refer to other anaphoric words; this makes the counting 13. Lojban connectives cannot be used to correctly convention a bit more complex, but leads to more generally translate English "If you water it, it will grow", because useful results. material implication is too weak and the special causal connectives, which connect assertions, are too strong. 16. Untensed sentences ought to be neutral with respect to What can be done instead? tense, mood, and aspect, but Brown treats untensed 24 sentences as expressing disposition, habit, or ability - 17. The decisions about the degrees of predicates (the lasting throughout all time. This is inconsistent with number of arguments expected for each) seem arbitrary. other parts of the language which treat ellipsized material Color words are treated as relations of degree 2; weather as merely unspecified. predicates which have no real subject nevertheless need at least one argument; event predicates like "kiss" don't have The Lojban tense system has been greatly elaborated and an argument specifying the time. What theory underlies the clarified with respect to its Loglan predecessor. There choice of place structures? are now specific mechanisms for stating the potentiality or actuality of a predication; in the absence of these, a Very little. Place structures are empirically derived, predication is neutral concerning the degree of actuality like the root word list itself, and present a far more expressed by it. It is no longer true that "untensed" difficult problem; therefore, they will be standardized (if predicates are used to express disposition or habit. They ever) only after everything else is complete. Many of the may be so used, by ellipsis, but are in fact neutral in the particular objections made above have force, and have absence of further evidence. already been accepted. There is no sufficiently complete Lojban tense, like other incidental modifiers of a and general case theory that allows the construction of a predication, tend to be contextually "sticky". When once priori place structures for the large variety of predicates specified in connected discourse, to whatever degree of that exist in the real world. precision seems appropriate, tense need not be respecified The current place structures of Lojban represent a three- in each sentence. In narration, this assumption is modi- way compromise: fewer places are easier to learn; more fied to the extent that each sentence is assumed to refer places make for more concision (arguments not represented to a slightly later time than the previous sentence, in the place structure may be added, but must be marked although with explicit tense markers it is possible to tell with appropriate case tags); the presence of an argument in a story in reversed or scrambled time order. Therefore, the place structure makes a metaphysical claim that it is each predication does have a tense, one that is implicit if required for the predication to be meaningful. This last not necessarily explicit. point requires some explanation. For example, the predicate "klama" ("come, go") has five places: the actor, the destination, the origin, the route, and the means. Lojban therefore claims that anything not involving these five notions (whether specified in a particular sentence or not) is not an instance of "klama". The predicate "cliva" ("leave") has the same places except for the destination; it is not necessary to be going anywhere in particular for "cliva" to hold. "litru" ("travel") has neither origin nor destination, merely, the actor, the route, and the means. The predicate "cadzu" ("walk"), involves only a walker and a means of walking (typically legs). One may walk without an origin or a destination (in circles, e.g.). For describing the act of walking from somewhere to somewhere, the tanru "cadzu klama" or the corresponding lujvo "dzukla" would be appropriate. The tanru "cadzu cliva" and "cadzu litru" may be similarly analyzed. 18. The Loglan phonological system is hard for English- speakers (to say nothing of Japanese-speakers) to use, due to the large numbers of consonant clusters and non-English diphthongs. How can a language be appropriate as an international auxiliary language when it is difficult to pronounce? Lojban phonology is much better than 1966 Loglan's was. There are now only 4 falling and 10 rising diphthongs, and the rising diphthongs are used only in names and in paralinguistic grunts representing emotions. All 25 vowel combinations are used, but they are separated by a voiceless vocalic glide written with an apostrophe, thus preventing diphthongization. English-speakers think of this glide as /h/, and even speakers of languages like French, which has no /h/, can manage this sound intervocalically. 25 Consonant clusters are controlled more carefully as well. In any event, the word-making algorithm used for Lojban Only 48 selected clusters are permitted initially; some of has the clear benefit of ensuring that phonemes occur in these, such as "ml" and "mr", do not appear in English, but the language in rough proportion to their occurrence in the are still possible to English-speakers with a bit of prac- source natural languages, and in patterns and orders that tice. Medial consonant clusters are also restricted, to are similar to those in the source languages (thus the prevent mixed voiced-unvoiced clusters, consecutive stops, first syllable of Lojban gismu most frequently ends in /n/, and other hard-to-handle combinations. The new Lojban reflecting the high frequency of syllable ending /n/ in sound /y/, IPA [@], is used to separate "bad" medial Chinese). The result is a language that is much more clusters wherever the morphology rules would otherwise pleasant-sounding than, for example, randomly chosen produce them. phoneme strings, while having at least some arguable claim Difficulties with the variety of permitted initial sounds to being free of the European cultural bias found in the are overestimated. Lojban's morphology makes pronouncing roots of most other constructed languages. these words easier than they first appear. Initial consonant clusters occur only in content words (predicates) 20. Loglan has an absolutely fixed word order; in some and names. These words seldom are spoken in isolation; cases, changes of word order are possible, but only by the rather, they are expressed in a speech stream with a addition of marker particles. Why is this? No natural rhythmic stress pattern preceded (and followed) by words language has an absolutely fixed word order (or for that that end with a vowel. The unambiguous morphology allows matter, an absolutely free one). the words to be broken apart even if run together at a very high speech rate. Meanwhile, though, the final vowel of Lojban's word order is by no means fixed. In fact, the preceding word serves to buffer the cluster, allowing Lojban is only secondarily a "word order" language at all. it to be pronounced as a much easier medial cluster. Thus Primarily, it is a particle language. Using a standard "le mlatu" ("the cat"), while officially pronounced word order allows many of the particles to be 'elided' /le,MLA,tu/, can be pronounced as /lem,LA,tu/ with no (dropped) in common cases. However, even the standard un- confusion to the listener. marked word order is by no means fixed; the principal In addition, the buffering sound, IPA [I] (the "i" of requirement is that at least one argument precede the "English "bit") is explicitly reserved for insertion at any predicate, but it is perfectly all right for all of the point into a Lojban word where the speaker requires it for arguments to do so, leading to an SOV word order rather ease of pronunciation. The word "mlatu" may be pronounced than the canonical SVO (subject-verb-object). VSO order is /mIlatu/ by those who cannot manage "ml", and nothing else expressible using only 1 particle. In two-argument need be changed. This sound is "stripped" by the listener predicates, OSV, OVS, and VOS are also possible with only before any further linguistic processing is done. one particle, and various even more scrambled orders (when more than two-place predicates are involved) can also be 19. Loglan words resemble their English cognates, but achieved. unsystematically so. Does this really aid learning, or does it make learning more difficult? 21. Loglan does not have WH-questions of the English kind (its questions are fill-in-the-blank) and does not have Lojban words are less English-like than prior versions of relative clauses. Therefore, no "unbounded" Loglan, since they were redone using new (1985) data on transformations (in the technical sense) exist in the numbers of speakers. English is now less important in language. Sentences like "I met a man that John said Mary relative terms than Mandarin Chinese, and most Lojban words told George to visit" can be translated only with great are fairly equal mixtures of the two languages, with lesser pain. How can such fairly common types of constructions be influences from Spanish, Hindi, Russian, and Arabic. The represented better? other languages used in 1966 Loglan are no longer as prominent in terms of world-wide number of speakers, and Lojban does have relative clauses, of the Hebrew type; were dropped from the word-making algorithm. the relative marker and the relative pronoun are distinct. There is no proven claim that the Lojban word-making The marker "poi" (or "noi" for non-restrictive clauses) algorithm has any meaningful correlation with learnability always comes at the beginning, but the embedded clause is of the words. Brown has reported that informal in normal order, using the relative pronoun "ke'a" at the 'engineering tests' were conducted early in the Loglan appropriate location to represent whatever is being Project, leading to his selection of the current algorithm, elaborated by the clause. but these tests have never been documented or subjected to review. The Logical Language Group has proposed formal 22. If Loglan is to be used as an international auxiliary tests of the algorithm, and is instrumenting its software language, it must be culturally neutral. But many of its used for teaching vocabulary to allow data to be gathered conceptual distinctions, for example the color set, are that will confirm or refute Brown's hypothesis. Gathering clearly biased towards particular languages. There is a this data may incidentally provide additional insights into word for 'brown', which is a color not used in Chinese the vocabulary learning process, enabling Lojban to serve (although a word exists, it is rare); on the other hand, the additional purpose of being a test bed for research in there is only one word for 'blue', although Russian- 2nd language acquisition. speakers convey the range of English 'blue' with two words. 26 How can Loglan be prevented from splintering into dialects which differ in such points? Perhaps not. However, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis tends to be confirmed if experiments show that Lojban-speakers To some extent, such splitting is inevitable and already have a greater facility with predicate logic than non- exists in natural languages. Some English-speakers may use Lojban-speakers. That would indicate that language the color term 'aqua' in their idiolect, whereas others (natural language) limits thought in ways that Lojban- lump that color with 'blue', and still others with 'green'. speakers can bypass. This form of test is not free of its Understanding is still possible, perhaps with some effort. own difficulties, which have been discussed elsewhere. The Lojban community will have to work out such problems for itself; there are sufficient clarifying mechanisms to Summary resolve differences in idiolect or style between individuals. The unambiguous syntax and other constraints Professor Zwicky's analysis raises several points of defined in the language prescription should make such dif- concern to linguists who might be interested in the ferences much more easily resolvable than, say, the potential use of Lojban for linguistic research. It is differences between two dialects of English. believed that sufficient planning and linguistic The prescriptive phase of Lojban is not intended to solve understanding (and occasionally serendipity) has been all problems (especially all semantic problems) but merely incorporated in the Lojban language design process to meet to provide enough structure to get a linguistic community these concerns. Other concerns no doubt exist; it is started. After that, the language will be allowed to believed they can similarly be addressed, and that Lojban evolve naturally, and will probably creolize a bit in some will prove linguistically viable, as well as useful in our cultures. (A recent discussion has pointed out that attempts to understand language. observing the creolization of such a highly prescribed Meanwhile, as Lojban has evolved since the 1966 version constructed language will undoubtedly reveal much about the of Loglan, new features, not analyzed by Zwicky, have been nature of the processes involved. added to the language, further enhancing its potential value. These features, such as Lojban's expression of the 23. Loglan is supposed to be intended as a test of the several varieties of natural language negation, the system Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its negative form: "structural of attitudinal words for emotional expression, and the features of language make a difference in our awareness of discursives used for metalinguistic manipulation and the relations between ideas" (Brown). Is this simply comment on the discourse in progress, raise new questions another way of saying "Distinctions are more likely to be about the adequacy of Lojban's design, while providing new noticed if structurally marked" (Z)? If so, this is opportunities for exploration of the properties of natural trivially true. language, as well as the correctness of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A better paraphrase might be "Unmarked features are more In 1991, it is time for linguists to again look at likely to be used, and therefore will tend to constitute Lojban, with the expectation that new questions, and new the backgrounded features of the language". By making the respect, will be forthcoming. unmarked features those which are most unlike natural-lan- guage features, a new set of thought habits will be created (if Sapir-Whorf is true) which will be measurably different A First Cut at a Linguistic Description of Lojban from those possessed by non-Lojban speakers. If Sapir- Whorf is false, which is the null hypothesis for Lojban Following are some notes on Loglan/Lojban of possible purposes, no such distinctions in thought habits will be interest to linguists. It is intended that this discussion detectable. is more germane to this audience than our general brochure. Further elaboration of Loglan Project thinking about We welcome questions, comments (and yes, criticisms) from Sapir-Whorf has led to another alternate formulation: "The the linguistic community on all aspects of the project. constraints imposed by structural features of language impose corresponding constraints on thought patterns." In Lojban is a public domain version of Loglan, a attempting to achieve cultural neutrality, Lojban has been constructed language first invented by Dr. James Cooke designed to minimize many structural constraints found in Brown in 1955. Dr. Brown is still working on his version natural languages (such as word order, and the structural of the language, which has significant flaws and remains distinctions between noun, verb, and adjective). If Sapir- proprietary. There is a dispute between Dr. Brown's group Whorf is true, there should be measurable broadening in and ours, which has been compared to the VolapЃk collapse thought patterns (possibly showing up as increased cre- and the Esperanto/Ido split. However, the 'splinter' in ativity or ability to see relationships between this case has survived and the Lojban community is growing superficially unlike concepts). Again, the null hypothesis at the limit of our resources to support it. We recommend is that no measurable distinction will exist. that anyone familiar with Loglan but not with Lojban contact us for more detailed information on the situation 24. How can "ease of thought" be measured? Measuring and comparison between the two versions. facility with predicate logic is not enough to establish Among the design criteria for Lojban has been particular "ease of thought" attention to criticisms of the language presented by 27 linguists over the past three decades. We believe that we will tend to involve different sorts of people than are have set the Loglan/ Lojban project on an academically interested in natural language research questions, although sound footing, and are seeking continued input and review there may be some overlap in trying to use Lojban as a comments from linguists as we document the effort. While simple model for natural language processing. we are unfunded and have not yet been published in peer- Lojban's design does recognize that most natural language reviewed journals, we expect both conditions to change. We usage resembling logical connectives is NOT truly logical. do have linguists actively involved in the design effort There are grammatical models for non-logical connection itself, most notably Dr. John Parks-Clifford, a professor built into the language, although these tend to be more at University of Missouri at St. Louis researching in tense highly marked than logical expressions. logic, among other areas, who is Vice President of our Lojban has systematic structures for logical negation, group. scalar negation, and metalinguistic negation, each The language has been demonstrated in conversation, separately expressed. Particular effort has gone into although there are no fluent speakers as of yet. My wife abstraction based on Aristotelian models, a and I and others practice the language in spontaneous tense/location/aspect system which can analytically express conversation perhaps 2 hours a week. Some poetry and other an enormous range of aspects, yet is quite unlike Indo- original writings in the language have been produced, European forms, systems for metalinguistic expression at a though most work has been with translations (from English), different 'level' than normal expression, and a system of most notably Saki's short story 'The Open Window', which analytically based attitudinal indicators (interjections) proved especially amenable to translation and exercised that include Amerind-like observer-based expressions, modal areas of the language not often found in conversation. attitudes, and an enormous range of emotional expression, The Loglan Project was originally started to develop a all grammatically independent from the rest of the language for testing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In language. Lojban also has a system for unambiguous reading addition to supporting this goal, Lojban is designed to of mathematical expressions, which is relatively untested support other possible experiments in linguistics, since such expressions are seldom found in normal including most significantly the expression of emotions, conversation. linguistic typology, and language education techniques. Lojban attempts to achieve cultural neutrality, a With regard to Sapir-Whorf, the formulation we use is necessity for its research goals. This is primarily that "the structure of a language constrains the thought of achieved by minimizing metaphysical assumptions, and the culture using that language". This formulation relates wherever assumptions must be made, to be super-inclusive of to grammar as well as semantics, with more design effort the range of natural language expressions to minimize at being placed on grammatical aspects, presuming that least overt biases. There is also particular militancy in semantics will develop with the formation of a Lojban- watching for hidden Americanism and English-language speaking subculture, and will, if not overtly biased, serve biases, since most of the developers and early speakers are as one means of examining for Sapir-Whorf effects. native speakers of American English. This is believed to The main basis for Lojban's use in Sapir-Whorf research have been generally successful, but is an area that we is its grammar, which is based on logical predication. particularly welcome close cross-examination. Of course, There are also explicit models for easily expressing first- the logical orientation of the grammar is a planned bias, order logical connectives. The strong bias towards logical sufficiently extreme that it should overwhelm minor structuring would be presumed to have a measurably sig- cultural constraints that are missed. nificant effect on expression, and if our formulation of Typologically, Lojban is SVO or SOV in its unmarked Sapir-Whorf is valid, on the culture that speaks the forms, although all other word orders are expressible with language. minimal marking. This typing makes a presumption of how to The language may show noticeable changes in first- interpret 'subject' in Lojban; the Lojban 'subject' is generation Lojban speakers who are native in other perhaps better considered as a 'topic'. Lojban has no languages (indeed, apparent effects have been observed inherent gender or number, and hence no morphological de- already, though it is uncertain whether these are true clension or agreement. As a predicate language, Lojban has Sapir-Whorf effects). A true Sapir-Whorf test will no distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives, and probably involve at-least-2nd generation speakers raised adverbs, although constructs comparable to each can be bilingually in Lojban and a natural language, and speakers identified. Tense/modality/aspect is optional, and can from a variety of cultures. The need to build numbers of range from simple to enormously complex. There are op- Lojban-speakers in many cultures has led to Loglan/Lojban's tional 'case markings' for the arguments of a predication, association with the international language movement, but the set of tags is not inherently limited or based on a although that is not the primary purpose for the language. particular theory of semantic cases. These markings occur Other applications, based on Lojban's unambiguous, in pre-position, but are not really "prepositions", since computer-parsable syntax, heavily analytical semantics, and they can occur in other contexts. Modification in Lojban intended cultural neutrality, include multi-lingual machine is left-to-right, with marked reversal and grouping of translation using Lojban as an interlingua, use of Lojban modifications possible. Lojban has two modes of as a medium for knowledge representation in computers, and possessive/associative expression, both preceding and use as a media for human-computer interface. Work in all following a target argument. Postposition modification of of these areas is still at an early stage, and naturally 28 arguments includes both relative clauses and relative forces, but after a certain point the language develops a phrases. momentum of its own, tending to carry the culture in While the vocabulary of predicates strictly defines directions already inherent in the language. arguments expressed in a prescribed order (generally forcing complex expressions to the end of a sentence along 4. minakami: (responding to 2.) I think this is only the with less frequently stated information), the 'case tag' weak form of the Whorfian hypothesis. The strong version system allows free addition of arguments to a predication, does assert that the structure and lexicon of a language thus minimizing constraints based on the semantics of in- shapes thought. According to J. R. Anderson: "Whorf felt dividual words. Lojban has a system for explicit and that such a rich variety of terms would cause the speaker implicit ellipsis, and a specified grammar for incomplete of the language to perceive the world differently from a or partial sentences to support pragmatic considerations in person who had only a single word for a particular use of the language. We are especially interested in category." This stronger version of the hypothesis is comments regarding other issues in pragmatics. generally considered disproved by Rosch's studies of color vision and similar experiments. Computer Network Discussions on Loglan/Lojban and 5. rjohnson: (responding to 2.) There are various versions Linguistics (and Esperanto and ...) of the idea around, which can be attributed to von Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf, and their commentators. The idea Subject: The Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis that language "determines what we can think about" is a very strong version of the hypothesis, probably stronger Participants: than Sapir would have liked, maybe stronger than Whorf. [email protected] (John Lenarcic) These things were not always stated with perfect clarity [email protected] (David Pautler) and consistency, though, so it's difficult to say. [email protected] (David M Tate) [jfl's version in 1.] is a slightly odd-sounding version [email protected] (Michael K. Minakami) of Whorf's thesis. It's hard to say if it's a good [email protected] (R o d Johnson) rendering of Whorf into modern terms, but it feels rather [email protected] reductive to me. At any rate, it's too narrow: Whorf was [email protected] (David Mark) concerned with Hopi versus English way of thinking about [email protected] (Colin Matheson) time in that particular article, but the thesis in general [email protected] (Janet M. Swisher) isn't strictly limited to that. Hopi merely provided (or [email protected] (William Ricker) seemed to provide) a striking illustration of two different ways of thinking. Note that "ways of thinking" is in fact 1. jfl: Briefly stated, the [Sapir/Whorf] hypothesis is : rather sloppy here: Whorf didn't actually investigate the ways Hopis think about time in any detail at all - he " Language shapes the way we think, merely projected his feeling about the language onto their and determines what we can think about." thinking. In essence, he assumed the truth of what later commentators saw as a "hypothesis". To Whorf, it was 2. pautler: (responding to 1.) A professor in pragmatics almost self-evident. told me this spring that the theory only claims that a given language forces its users to mentally keep track of 6. pautler: (continuation of 2.) I believe the comparison certain information like time-of-occurrence, etc. that is S/W used to illustrate this was the bookkeeping required by needed to make correct decisions about tense, etc. that are a Southwest Native American language (Hopi?) regarding the required to form sentences. source or validation of information - evidently there are markers performing the function of "FOAF", etc. that are as 3. dtate: (responding to 2.) I think this understates the necessary to well-formedness in that language (which does hypothesis, at least in Whorf's version. Whorf claimed not mark tense) as tense is to English (which does not mark that, since we think in language, the language in which we validation). Of course, the Native American language can think will have enormous impact on the ways in which we express time-of-occurrence if need be, just as English can think, tending to reinforce certain patterns and undermine express source-of-information, but neither is explicitly others. It could be something as blatant as having the required by the language itself. I believe the traditional word for "good" being etymologically related to that for example: "strong", tending to reinforce "might makes right" thinking, or as subtle as the lack of a socially acceptable (~11 Inuit language words for snow) and (~1 English word passive voice encouraging thinking of one's self as an for snow) ==> (Inuit language and English users think agent and not as an object (or, of course, the converse). about snow differently) There is, to be sure, a "chicken and egg" question here: is it the language that shapes the culture, or the culture might not be due to S/W and probably misrepresents their that shapes the language? The answer (IMHO) [Net idea. But I am not a linguist, nor have I read their work. abbreviation: "In my humble opinion"] is "both": the I just wanted to suggest that applications of S/W may not language evolves because of and in accordance with cultural be what you actually want to look for. 29 universals, as in Berlin and Kay's studies of color terms. 7. rjohnson: (responding to 6.) Yes. Whorf, though, not In the huge gray area, evidence seems hard to come by. I Sapir/Whorf. Whorf, though he had had some training, was was briefly involved with a cognitive science team a few basically a gifted amateur; Sapir was less inclined to make years back that was grappling with some of these questions, sweeping claims - he knew how language has a way of stab- and it seemed to me that the task of designing experiments bing such claims in the back. was extraordinarily hard - every approach had serious Boas, in fact, in the Introduction to the "Handbook of pitfalls. I don't know how their work turned out, though. American Indian Languages" (1911) [introduces the "snow" example]. (At least this is the point at which it was 11. colin: (responding to 7.) I agree with your gut introduced into linguistics.) Geoff Pullum has recently feeling. I suppose the trouble is, as with many Linguistic done a fairly comprehensive study of where this idea comes issues, that the "truth" of the matter lies at such a level from and how it has mutated into "50 words for snow", of abstraction that it's difficult just to talk about it. "*100* words for snow," etc. However, here's one suggestion of one version of the thesis I, and I think many other linguists (though not all), (count the hedges!). have a gut feeling that somewhere, somehow, deep down, Perhaps it's true that the act of "compressing" there's a kernel of truth in the idea, but no attempt to abstractions into concepts represented by single lexical frame it as an empirical hypothesis has, to my knowledge, items or phrases has a qualitative effect on the kinds of really led anywhere. things it is possible to talk about. Thus although it's probably the case that one can express any particular 8. hullp: (responding to 7.) Actually, several studies concept in any language periphrastically, it might just be have indeed led somewhere. Casagrande's 1950's studies that the ability to encapsulate things in immediately demonstrated a so-called Whorfian effect on children's transferrable units affects the sorts of transfer that are perception of shape. The comparison was between Navaho possible. (Where the transfer is of information between speakers (whose language mandates the marking of shape with humans.) inflections) and English speakers. There have been a few Is this version of the Sapir/Whorf stuff part of the others (not many, admittedly) that have demonstrated original, by the way? similar effects. The problem is that most of the tests of the hypothesis have been tests of color perception and 12. swsh: (responding to 11.) No, I don't think so. In my categorization. Color perception is strongly rooted in understanding, Whorf and Sapir were not interested so much physiology and is thus uniform across cultures to a large in what "one can express" in a given language, as in the degree. Any language effects would have to be in a domain conceptual categories which underlie grammatical ones and for which there is less evidence for a physical basis. which are used by speakers as a guide to experience. Thus, the important thing in their view is not how many words for 9. dmark: (responding to 8.) In fact, Lakoff (in "Women, snow a language has, but what assumptions about things like Fire, ...") discusses a study by Kay and Kempton that space, time, form, substance, etc., are implicit in the seemed to clearly demonstrate linguistic relativity in language's grammatical categories. The controversial part color perception. Phillip Hull is correct in pointing out about what they, particularly Whorf, said is the thesis the strong physiological basis of color perception. Thus that speakers use these assumptions to guide their habitual different color perception due to language seems pretty beliefs and attitudes, and therefore see them as arising powerful evidence. (I could describe the experiment, from directly from reality, rather than projected on to it. Lakoff's account, and/or give the full reference, if people The "Whorfian hypothesis" is often stated as having two want me to.) forms, a "hard" version (language determines thought) and a "soft" version (language and thought are kinda sorta 10. rjohnson: (responding to 8.) Thanks for this related). From Whorf's writings, it appears that he information. I guess I was using "led anywhere" in a himself held views more towards the "soft" end of the spec- somewhat more global sense. That is, I know there have trum. He shied away from saying there is a "correlation", been a smattering of studies that purport to be consistent that being too definite a word, preferring to say that it with ("confirm" is too strong, I think) the S/W hypothesis could be shown that there are cases where linguistic - but it doesn't seem that any real coherent picture categories are in some way connected to cultural ones, even emerges of "thought" as a whole being strongly affected by if it's not universally true. However, it seems to me that "language" as a whole; that is, we have little evidence it would be mighty odd to find a language whose grammar that "Whorfian" effects are of fundamental importance to revealed a categorical system that was otherwise unused by cognition. Instead we get hints that there may be speakers, either in individual cognition, or as part of the something there, but the results are mixed and often rather attendant culture. tentative. Does this fit with your perspective on things? (Admittedly, notions like "of fundamental importance" are 13. wdr: (responding to 11.) If I understood that pretty difficult to assess.) periphrastic version of the hypothesis, I think it has as a On the other hand, as you say, the best-known corollary that English is not highly suited to it's own disconfirming studies suffer from being in the relatively transfer. Which, given the context, I suspect may have been few areas where there probably are reliable hard-wired 30 Colin's point, but if it wasn't, I'll suggest it more One: The audio-visual isomorphism. Presumably, this is openly. an attempt to address the rather poor way that some written Is a natural language the right language in which to languages reflect the spoken language (such as English). discuss the deficiencies of natural languages? This fails to predict variations of accent, as well as the That it was not was one of the original motivations of language-specific biases of speakers - English speakers for the Loglan/Lojban successor of Esperanto. Can one of you instance will probably continue to mark yes-no questions sci.lang folks translate the S/W hypotheses various with a rising tone. Of course this isn't indicated in the statements in this newsgroup lately into Lojban and give us written form, so already the idea of audio-visual an unbiased account of how manipulable they are in a non- isomorphism is weak at best. formal yet unnatural language? [ed.: no one has done this yet - any volunteers?] 2. lojbab: (responding to 1.) Yes, English speakers probably will. But Hindi speakers probably won't. Thus 14. pautler: (wrapping up) Perhaps many of you are tiring rising tone (pitch) will not be a significant indication in of the discussion about the claims made by S/W, but I'm Lojban. Now, in the English 'dialect' of Lojban, such going to take the risk of extending the debate: suprasegmentals will probably be redundant and reinforcing Does the S/W hypothesis suggest that we view a particular information to the truly significant version of the language as a collection of tools used to achieve social questioned contained in the words. And if for some other (communicative, in particular) goals? The analogy I have reason, your voice rises in pitch, if there is no 'xu', it in mind is this: our ability to achieve tasks is determined is not a yes/no question. by the tools we have at hand, which forces us to think As an advantage, I suspect that it will be a lot easier about solving the task primarily in terms of what subtask to get computers voice-processing the Lojban phonemes than each tool can achieve. Of course, we can always attempt to the English suprasegmentals (Anyone have any actual invent new tools if they are needed, but invention is knowledge on this?) difficult for both language conventions and tools, so the analogy still holds. 3. dan: (continuation of 1.) Furthermore, the idea of a My claim, then, is this: if this is an accurate analogy, language that assumes all of its speakers will have then should the S/W hypothesis be any more surprising than precisely the same accent is too terrifying to contemplate, a claim that farmers and stockbrokers think differently yet Lojban's writing system would seem to depend on this about the world due to the different means they have of fact. interacting with it? 4. lojbab: (responding to 3.) Lojban's prescription says nothing about 'accent'. Each of the sounds we've defined ________________________ as phonemic has a certain range wherein it is phonemic. Subject: Lojban as seen by the linguistics and cognitive Lojban 'r' can range from a full trill to a simple flap, science community for example, and we've made no prescription regarding dark 'l' vs. light 'l'. Difference in these phonemes will Participants: result in different 'accents'. There will probably be less [email protected] (Dan Parmenter) spread than most natural languages, but there will be some [email protected] (John Cowan) spread. [email protected] (Michael Newton) [email protected] (Rod Johnson) 5. cowan: (responding to 3.) Of course [it's too [email protected] (David M Tate) terrifying to contemplate]! However, this neglects the [email protected] (Harold Somers) distinction between "emic" and "etic" features of the [email protected] (Lars Aronsson) language. The claim of audio-visual isomorphism is not [email protected] (Bob LeChevalier) that every possible distinction of speech is represented in [email protected] (Larry P Gorbet) the written form, but only that all significant distinc- [email protected] (Steven Daryl McCullough) tions are so represented. For example, true-false [email protected] (David A. Johns) questions may be signalled (among English speakers) with a [email protected] (Greg Lee) rising tone, but also must be signalled with the prefix word "xu". The "xu" carries the entire content, and will 1. dan: (starting the debate - several paragraphs below be understood by any fluent Lojbanist from whatever back- elucidate his opinions further) I have been acquainted ground. The tone is superfluous. with Lojban for a few years now, and have a few thoughts on the matter. 6. dan: (responding to 5.) If every Lojban speaker were a My overall impression is that a monumental effort is native English speaker, you could just as easily argue that being made by an astonishingly large group of people, and the "xu" is superfluous. But this is circular reasoning. that while it is quite well-intentioned, its ultimate goals Is the purpose of Lojban to be spoken in a dull monotone? are unattainable at best, and highly suspicious at worst. Or do you expect the writing system to evolve to account Some minor and major objections: for any variations in tone that might come along? Suppose some third-generation Lojban speakers always mark yes-no 31 questions with a falling tone accompanied by a series of the null hypothesis. To develop Lojban at all, we must elaborate hand-jives (gestures are expressive too), will assume SWH. If Lojban turns out to have no effect on you mark this in the written version as well? How do you thought, i.e. to be a mere code, SWH will not be confirmed. determine what a "significant" feature of the language is? (This is not to say it will be disproved.) 7. cowan: (responding to 6.) We determine significant 12. lojbab: (responding to 10.) Assumed to be what? True? features by defining them. Again, this is a constructed No. Important enough to test? Yes. If Sapir-Whorf is language, and a posteriori reasoning appropriate to natural important enough to test, then Lojban must be designed with (non-constructed) languages doesn't necessarily fit all features that will likely have a noticeable effect, while cases. being sufficiently culturally neutral that non-Lojban In the baseline version of Lojban, the way of marking a variables can be at least statistically removed. true-false question is to prefix it with "xu". This is The Lojban design HAS to assume that Sapir-Whorf is true, true by definition, a priori. Once the language is or that design will be meaningless for experimental baselined, the normal processes of linguistic change may purposes. indeed alter the marking system to something involving As to whether those working on the language 'tacitly tone, gesture, or toe-wiggling. At that time, Lojban will assume' Sapir-Whorf, I doubt it. There are no doubt many be a natural language (defined here as one having native who believe SWH true, and a couple I know of who believe it speakers) and will need to be investigated by the methods false, but are willing to see. Most are fairly open- of ordinary synchronic linguistics. minded. In any case, if we are being 'good scientists', (When Bob LeChevalier, the most fluent speaker at our individual opinions on the hypotheses we investigate present, speaks in the language, he does tend to talk in a shouldn't matter, since some degree of professional monotone, possibly bending over backwards to avoid detachment is expected. When I work on Lojban as a influence from English suprasegmentals. He does hesitate researcher, I try to turn off that part of me that does longer between sentences than at other mandatory pauses, 'Lojban promotion' (admittedly a bit more biased). I rely though.) on peer review to catch any biases from my personal views that slip into my work. Given the wide disparity of views 8. lojbab: (responding to 6.) That would be a truly odd among Lojban workers, and our sensitivity towards avoiding purpose for a language - to be spoken in a monotone. :-) unnecessary bias, I'm confident that there is no problem. The writing system would not need recognize variations in If Sapir-Whorf (or its equivalent - since a lot of people pitch, gestures, or any other feature of spoken language assume it without even knowing it exists) is tacitly unless these came to convey variations in meaning that were assumed by the world, it seems an especially important not already reflected (and reflectable) in the written lan- question to investigate scientifically. If SWH is used by guage. In addition, since human-computer interaction using some to justify racism, some concrete data to attack such Lojban is intended to be significant in its usefulness, it seems unlikely that there will evolve variations that cannot be easily recognized AND reproduced by a computer listener/speaker. A significant feature of a logical language, of course, is one that affects the truth conditions of its statements. A change or variation in the language would not be 'significant' unless it affected such truth conditions. A change which introduced ambiguity would obviously be significant. 9. cowan: (continuation of 5.) Note also that audio-visual isomorphism cuts both ways. It ensures not only that every "emic" feature of speech is representable in writing, but also that features of text such as paragraphing, structural punctuation, parenthesis, and layout have representations in speech. For example, the word "ni'o" signals a change of subject and is used to separate spoken paragraphs; likewise, non-mathematical parentheses are pronounced "to" for "(" and "toi" for ")". 10. dan: (continuation of 1., from 3.) TWO: Sapir/Whorf is tacitly assumed by almost everyone that I've talked to in connection to Lojban. This isn't unusual, since it's also assumed by an astonishing portion of the world at large. 11. cowan: (responding to 10.) The Lojban project is founded on assuming the truth of SWH; the falsity of SWH is 32 use is more effective than personal distaste. Just because 18. lojbab: (responding to 17.) Indeed. I know that in a scientific question has political ramifications based on the Loglan/Lojban community, Reed Riner at Northern Arizona its possible outcomes does not mean that the question and John Atkins and Carol Eastman at Washington are shouldn't be asked, or moreover, shouldn't be answered. anthropologists that were/are interested in S/W. In addition, there is another 'related field' that makes 13. dan: (responding to 12.) Yes, I'd say that a heavy use of S/W, either directly, or in an evolved form. surprisingly large number of people when informed about S/W Semiotics apparently uses a lot of ideas these days that at will automatically assume it to be true. The issue to me least tacitly assume some degree of cultural relativity, is one of putting the cart before the horse: to whit, many and I'm told Umberto Eco, is particularly 'Whorfian' in his people have astonishingly racist attitudes about a wide ideas. I don't know these things directly, having no range of phenomena. Language is no exception. If you read meaningful exposure to semiotics. My source is Robert the literature of the whole English First movement, one Gorsch at St. Mary's College in CA, who teaches En- sees thinly veiled racism of the worst sort. Also witness glish/Semiotics/Linguistics there. He's been developing an the thinly veiled classism of most of the prescriptivists - introductory course in Semiotics showing the evolution of the goal is to avoid sounding "low class". Even something S/W into current semiotics theories (incidentally relying as simple as differing accents within a homogeneous speech on Esperanto and Lojban as primary examples). We published community can cause people to raise their eyebrows. Human his course outline and bibliography in a recent issue of beings seem to have an overwhelming urge to pigeonhole our internal journal, Ju'i Lobypli. people by any method possible. What does this have to do with S/W? Well, given that nobody seems particularly 19. dan: (responding to 18.) Eco is interested in a number satisfied either way with the results of actual psy- of theories that are out of vogue among Chomskian cholinguistic tests that have been tried, if someone linguists. He also seems to have an interest in the so- believes S/W then they can choose to ignore any test called "meaning-based" theories of language, posited by results that seem to go against it and start to make some people like Schank, in the NLP [natural language pretty frightening statements. processing] community. He devotes some space to Schank's theory of conceptual dependency in several books (titles 14. dan: (continuation of 1., from 10.) What I'm getting forgotten ...sorry!). at is that there is a serious danger that people who Many of fields related and unrelated to semiotics also believe in the S/W hypothesis will use this belief to make make use of certain Whorfian arguments. Some feminist claims about their language being superior to someone theorists have an axe to grind about how language is used else's. The empirical basis for these claims has already to oppress women. been discussed, so I won't get into it, except to say that I remain unconvinced by the S/W hypothesis. 20. dan: (continuing 17.) To me, the idea of linguistic equality - that all languages are more or less created 15. cowan: (responding to 10 and 14.) One of the major equal, is a much more egalitarian view. It jibes well with workers in Lojban [ed.: pc] believes that SWH is in fact my notion that all people are created equal. This false. There is as diverse a variety of views on SWH in principle forms the basis for much in the way of my the Lojban community as on any other subject. political views. I don't want to get into a debate here about the politics of language, but it's something I feel 16. lojbab: (responding to 14.) Yes, there is [a serious very strongly about. danger]. But there is also the chance that if SWH is true, that the reverse will happen. Based on the natural 21. lgorbet: (responding to 20.) The phrase in Dan's selection paradigm (also perhaps questionable with regard recent posts that confuses me a lot is "all languages are to languages - but the analogy is useful), if one language equal". So far as I can see that may well - probably has is 'superior' to another in some small area (such as nothing to do with whether (some version or other of) S/W mathematical thinking - as in the previous example), the is true or not. fact that the other language survives indicates that it I suspect the most common belief of linguists who think also has some compensating advantages that suit its niche. about S/W at all is that (a) S/W is true; and (b) all Thus Sapir-Whorf might help us see the virtue in all languages are "equal". AND you seem to be assuming that languages and cultures. I certainly don't think that if the truth of S/W entails inequality (in some unstated Lojban was proved able to assist or improve logical sense) of languages. All S/W says, even in the strongest thinking, that it should displace English or any other versions I know anyone competent who believes, is that lan- language. To borrow someone else's line, Lojban becomes guages are different in ways that leads their speakers to another tool in the linguistic tool chest. You learn it tend to think differently. like an English speaker learns French or FORTRAN, to meet a Thanks to work by lots of folk over the past half century communication need that is not well served by English. (oops, more than that), it's pretty clear that different languages have lots in common as well as some striking 17. dan: (responding to 16.) I am told that among differences. So probably most of us (my wild supposition, I anthropologists, S/W in some form, is popular. admit) think that the impact of a true S/W would not be all that huge a difference. But a difference in 33 conceptualization and knowledge is not the same thing as 'cat', cidja 'food', lante 'can', and gacri 'cover' take inequality. care of all the content words, each of which (luckily for It almost seems to me that to assume that different ways me) has a single-word Lojban equivalent. I will comment on of thinking are unequal ways of thinking plays into the the function words I use as I use them. hands of racists even more... It should be stated from the start that Lojban interprets This is NOT a flame. You raise some important issues, dyadic compounds as <modifier> followed by <modificand>, in many of which I agree with, especially about the ways our other words AN [adjective-noun order], although this can be work can get abused by those with an unsavory agenda. changed with the particle "co". [The discussion of Sapir-Whorf and its possible racist use continued for quite a while, and is omitted.] [numbers relate back to English in 24.] 1) "slasi mlatu cidja lante gacri". This form is totally 22. dan (continuation of 1., from 14.): This empirical unmarked, and has the meaning of the English 1) because basis is something that I use as a foundation for my Lojban associates left-to-right. In other words, "slasi personal ideological beliefs with regard to such issues as mlatu cidja lante" modifies "gacri", "slasi mlatu cidja" English-only laws and prescriptivism (by the likes of modifies "lante", "slasi mlatu" modifies "cidja", and Safire, Lederle, Simon et al.). It seems to me that the "slasi" modifies "mlatu". Lojbanists, who are already claiming that the language 2) "slasi mlatu bo cidja lante gacri". The function word makes them think more clearly on certain things are setting "bo" causes the two content words surrounding it to be most themselves up for a type of elitism that I find closely associated. So "mlatu" modifies "cidja". frightening. Otherwise, left-to-right modification remains intact, so THREE: Lojban's allegedly unambiguous syntax. The bottom that "slasi" modifies "mlatu bo cidja", etc. line is that "plastic cat food can cover" is still 3) "slasi je mlatu bo cidja lante gacri". Here we make ambiguous in Lojban. two coordinated claims about the "lante", namely that it is of type "mlatu bo cidja" (a cat-food can) and that it is 23. cowan: (responding to 22.) This English utterance is "slasi" (plastic). So we insert the particle "je" which ambiguous in three different ways. Syntactically, it might means this type of "and". (There are several Lojban words be a noun phrase (a kind of cover) or a sentence (asserting for "and", but "je" is the one that's grammatical in this that plastic cat food is capable of covering something). context). Lojban does not have this kind of ambiguity: the first 4) "slasi mlatu cidja lante bo gacri". Here "lante" and would be "lo slasi mlatu cidja lante gacri" and the second "gacri" are grouped, so that "slasi mlatu cidja" (food for would be "lo slasi mlatu cidja ka'e gacri". plastic cats) modifies "lante bo gacri" (can-type-of cover). 24. harold: (responding to 23.) Well, I think you'll find 5) "slasi mlatu bo cidja lante bo gacri". Here we have that syntactically the phrase is MUCH more ambiguous: as a three components grouped in left-to-right order: "slasi", noun phrase, ignoring the semantic ambiguity of any "mlatu bo cidja", and "lante bo gacri". Therefore "slasi noun+noun pairing (e.g. "cat food" = food for cats, food mlatu bo cidja" modifies "lante bo gacri", making this a made of cats, food which looks like a cat; "can cover" = plastic cat-food type of can-cover. cover for a can, cover made out of a can; "plastic cat" = 6) "slasi bo mlatu cidja bo lante gacri". Here again we cat made out of plastic, cat which behaves like plastic, have three components, but different ones from those cat which belongs to plastic, etc) it has readings [numbers appearing in 5). added for later cross-reference]: 8) "slasi je ke mlatu cidja lante ke'e gacri". Here we introduce the new particles "ke" and "ke'e". These group a cover for plastic cat food cans i.e. in the same way that "bo" does, but everything between "ke" a cover for cans which contain plastic cat food i.e. and "ke'e" is grouped. Wherever "bo" appears between two 1 a cover for cans which contain food for plastic cats or words, it can be replaced by "ke" before the first and 2 a cover for cans which contain plastic food for cats or "ke'e" after the second. So 4) can be rewritten as "slasi 3 a cover for plastic cans which contain cat food or else mlatu cidja ke lante gacri", with elision of "ke'e" at the a can cover for plastic cat food i.e. end of the phrase. This is an example of a general point 4 a can cover for food for plastic cats or about Lojban: most things are expressible using both 5 a can cover for plastic food for cats or else "forethought" and "afterthought" forms, comparable to the a food can cover for plastic cats i.e. difference in English between "both A and B" and "A and B". 6 a cover for a food can for plastic cats or In this case, we need the whole of "mlatu cidja lante" to 7 a can cover for food for plastic cats or else group as one modifier, so "bo" is not usable. We also need a cat food can cover made of plastic i.e. "je" because again two claims are being made, that the a cover, made of plastic, for cat food cans i.e. cover is both plastic and for cat-food cans. 8 a cover, made of plastic, for cans for cat food or 9) "slasi je mlatu bo cidja bo lante gacri". Here "bo" 9 a cover, made of plastic, for food cans for cats serves us again, in contradistinction to 8), because of an additional rule that comes into play when "bo" appears on 25. cowan: (responding to 24.) Let me render each of these both sides of an element: it is right-grouping. So whereas forms into Lojban. As a glossary, slasi 'plastic', mlatu "A B C" means that "A B" modifies "C", "A bo B bo C" means 34 that A modifies "B bo C". So here we claim that the cover in each word is at least two-ways ambiguous (all are both is both plastic and is of type "cat food-can". nouns and verbs, and some are also adjectives). There are other ways to express these ideas if the constraint on ordering the content words is relaxed. There 30. aronsson: (responding to 28.) What if the intended are also lots of other possibilities expressible by the grouping was "(plastic and ((cat type of food) type of Lojban syntax, such as "slasi bo mlatu bo cidja bo lante bo can)) type of cover"? That is a plastic cover for these gacri", which might be a plastic type of food-can cover for cans (which are probably made of tin - I would consider use by cats. In addition, "je" (and) can be replaced by this more probable) rather than a generic cover for these "ja" (inclusive or) or "jonai" (exclusive or) or any of the plastic cans. Would the sentence still translate into "lo other Boolean relationship, or by various non-logical slasi je mlatu bo cidja lante gacri"? Could the same connectives such as "joi" (mass mixture): "slasi joi mlatu sentence also mean "(((plastic and cat) type of food) type cidja" would be food made from plastic and from cats [mixed of can) type of cover"? (Never mind why anybody would make together]. plastic food - that is semantics!) If any of the above, Lojban must be considered ambiguous. 26. cowan: (continuing 23.) In the English utterance, it is unclear exactly what modifies what. 31. cowan: (responding to 30.) No. "(plastic and ((cat type of food) type of can) type of cover" would be "lo 27. harold: (responding to 26., continuing 24.) I don't slasi je ke mlatu cidja lante ke'e gacri", where "ke" and think so. Of the above interpretations, there is a more or "ke'e" are logical parentheses. "(((plastic and cat) type less clear ranking of preference, notwithstanding some of food) type of can) type of cover)" would be "lo slasi je context which promotes an unusual reading (e.g. a story mlatu cidja lante gacri" because "je" has higher precedence about plastic cats): I find (8) the most plausible, with than concatenation, though lower than "bo". (3) next best. The least plausible are the ones involving plastic cats or plastic food. 32. aronsson: (continuing 30.) Or what if both modifiers have a more complex form? In the example above, the 28. cowan: (continuing 23., from 26.) So Lojban's unmarked modifier plastic has the simplest possible form, but form is grouped left-to-right unambiguously, and other consider a phrase like (I wrote this with Emacs LISP mode!) groupings can be unambiguously marked by the insertion of appropriate structure words. ((some-special type of plastic) and 29. harold: (responding to 28., continuing 27.) It is (((cat or dog) relatively easy to construct plausible noun phrases type of food) consisting of five consecutive nouns for all the above type of can)) patterns, just by substituting more appropriate nouns: e.g. type of cover 1 tabby cat food can cover 2 soya-bean cat food can cover Here, parenthesis are needed not only for the general 3 (already plausible) grouping, but also to unambiguously determine the 4 =1 precedence of "and" and "or"! IMHO [Net abbreviation: "In 5 =2 my humble opinion"], there are exactly two ways of 6 =1 designing a ambiguous-free language, none of which will 7 =1 make it look like any human language: 1) Using parenthesis 8 (preferred reading) as in LISP [see examples above] and 2) Using only very 9 (already plausible) short sentences as in ordinary computer machine language. In case 2, the example would read: And of course, we can construct longer sequences of noun phrases, with even larger numbers of ambiguities. Cover. Can Lojban handle all of these, and, more important, Cover for can. would we want a language to do so? The point is that most Can for food. of the readings are implausible for semantic reasons, but Food for cat. all (or most) groupings are possible, given the appropriate Cover made of plastic. words. The same thing happens with PP attachment by the way. The problem is that you cannot tell a priori which 33. cowan: (responding to 32.) The first method grouping will be plausible: NLP [natural language (parenthesis) is employed, using "ke"/"ke'e" parenthesis processing] programs have to try all possible groupings and marks as needed. This is not supposed to "look like any then test them for semantic coherence, a terrible waste of natural language"; this is precisely the area where Lojban effort with big noun phrases or sequences of ambiguous differs from all natural languages, and constitutes the words like: evidence that Lojban is not an "{English, Chinese, etc.}- based code". Gas pump prices rose last time oil stocks fell "And" and "or" have the same precedence and are left associative; simple concatenation is also left associative, 35 whereas "bo" (which semantically is the same as one fish Y, such that X loves Y." The other interpretation concatenation, i.e. undefined) is high-precedence and right could be given by "converting" the predicate with the associative. particle "se". This operation reverses the order of the arguments to a predicate. "pa finpe se prami ro nanmu", 34. cowan: (continuing 23., from 28.) On a third level, a literally "one fish be-loved-by all man" means "There phrase like "cat food" is ambiguous semantically. Is it exists one fish Y, for all men X, such that X loves Y." food for cats or food consisting of cats? Here Lojban Note that conversion is analogous to the passive voice but really is ambiguous, but the ambiguity is semantic not has no semantic significance other than this inversion of syntactic. The three main kinds of ambiguity in Lojban quantifiers. (this kind, ellipsis, and the ambiguity of names (which Lojban also has machinery for expressing the quantifiers Sam?)) are all semantic in nature. As in any natural externally in a prenex, terminated by the word "zo'u". So language, any of these ambiguities can be "expanded" on the another set of Lojban paraphrases for your sentences above semantic level by adding more information: "lo mlatu is "ro da poi nanmu pa de poi finpe zo'u da prami de", cidja" (a cat type of food) could become "da poi cidja loi literally "all X which is-a-man, one Y which is-a-fish, X mlatu" (something which is-food-for the-mass-of cats). loves Y"; and "pa de poi finpe ro da poi nanmu zo'u da prami de", literally "one Y which is-a-fish, all X which 35. dan: (responding to 34.) Semantic ambiguity is present is-a-man, X loves Y". Presumably, a transformational all over the place. How does Lojban handle issues like grammar of Lojban would derive both of these surface quantifier scope ambiguity? In English, a sentence like structures (with and without prenex) from the same "Every man loves a fish" is ambiguous. If Lojban merely underlying deep structures. paraphrases such utterances, to two separate utterances What Lojban does not have is any sentence which means along the lines of: both of your two forms ambiguously. "For all x, There exists a y such that x loves y" "There exists a y for all x such that x loves y" 40. lojbab: (continuation of 37, in response to 35.) You while tolerating some version of the original utterance, cannot 'do the same thing in English'. Even if the two than nothing has been accomplished. I can do the same English paraphrases are considered 'standard English' (and thing in English. many linguists do not, identifying them as a jargon), neither is the same as Dan's original. Fill in 'man' for 36. cowan: (responding to 35.) 'x' and 'fish' for 'y', and the result is ungrammatical: 1) Lojban has mechanisms for setting quantifier scopes, involving explicit quantifiers appearing in a prenex. *"For all man, there exists a fish such that man loves 2) Loglan/Lojban has never claimed to be free of semantic fish." ambiguity. Your original objection 3 [see 22. above] *"There exists a fish for all man such that man loves (refers to "allegedly unambiguous syntax", but on fish." investigation your objections are to semantic rather than syntactic ambiguity. Our claims are: a) Lojban is free of It takes some extensive manipulations to turn these into phonological, morphological, and syntactic ambiguity, and grammatical sentences, and the results are not 'obviously' b) Lojban semantic ambiguity is present only in clearly the same as the English original. These same manipulations marked places within the language: a Lojbanist knows when do not suffice for all possible substitutions: if 'x' is he/she is using an ambiguous form, and can replace it as 'George' and 'y' is 'fish', or if 'x' is 'George' and 'y' needed with unambiguous ones. is 'Mary', you have to perform different transforms. In Lojban, the transforms are independent of the value. 37. lojbab: (responding to 35.) I disagree [with dan]. For one thing, if Lojban can express the multiple meanings 41. aronsson: (responding to 34.) I fail to see the better and more clearly than English, and if the difference. When designing an artificial language one expressions can be more easily manipulated logically, this could outlaw all use of modifiers without modifier would presumably 'enhance logical thinking' if SWH is true. indicators (prepositions or similar). Thus it would have Lojban doesn't 'tolerate some version of the original' in been possible for the Lojban designers to make "cat food" the sense that the parallel translation to "Every man loves illegal, only allowing "food for cats" or "food made-of a fish" - "ro nanmu cu prami pa finpe" is not equivalent to cats". If they did not do this, they obviously failed to both English paraphrases. design an ambiguity-free language. 38. dan: (responding to 37.) So what's the gloss of the 42. cowan: (responding to 41.) We didn't want to make the Lojban sentence? Which reading does it correspond to? Is language semantically unambiguous. there a quick and easy way to disambiguate? 1) The language is phonologically, morphologically, and syntactically unambiguous; and 39. cowan: (responding to 38.) The Lojban rule is that 2) the language is semantically ambiguous only in quantifiers are applied in the order in which they appear specified areas, of which this is one (making open com- in the sentence, so "ro nanmu cu prami pa finpe", literally pounds by concatenation). "all man love one fish" means "For all men X, there exists 36 43. dan: (continuation of 1., from 22.) Natural languages complete prescription it has a lot better likelihood of re- are not unambiguous. From the acquisition side, ambiguous sistance to 'undesirable' change. There is no way to tell languages are much easier to learn for a child than a if the misuse of 'hopefully' or split infinitives would logical language would be. The principles of Universal have entered English if a) there had not already been a Grammar [UG] do not seem to produce unambiguous languages, tolerance in English for non-standard usages of this type and all natural languages are constructed according to the and b) either of these truly resulted in mis-communication. principles of UG. Note that 'misplaced modifiers', which can in some instances cause miscommunication, are a different question, 44. cowan: (responding to 43.) A lot of unproven and are probably frowned on by most speakers IF they become assumptions here. Common assumptions, yes, but still aware of the ambiguity. In Lojban, of course, the speaker unproven. We simply don't know whether a child could WILL be more aware of the ambiguity - at least so we hope. become competent in Lojban. Maybe when the language is complete and documented, somebody will be inspired to start raising bilingual children. There are native speakers of Esperanto, after all, whose parents have no other language in common. 45. kimba: (responding to 43.) If you're going to get stuck into people for assuming Sapir/ Whorf, I think you had better not be so blase about assuming the existence of "the principles of UG". The way you throw it in "jargonwise" I assume you mean the Chomskian notion, which will meet with plenty of disagreement. I suppose you could claim to mean any statements about properties which all/no languages have, but then the 2nd clause is vacuous. 46. dan: (responding to 45.) I do tacitly assume UG. To me, it seems a whole lot easier to swallow than SW, or other theories of linguistic relativism. 47. dtate: (responding to 46.) What a strange comment. As far as I can tell, UG (as a hypothesis about language) and SW (as a hypothesis about language and thought) are independent. Buying into UG wouldn't make me more or less apt to buy into S/W, nor vice versa. They're certainly not competing theories. They address totally different topics. I think the giveaway here is the phrase "linguistic relativism". I can't tell from context exactly what Dan means by this. It looks like the link is something like "S/W says that how you think is influenced by what language you think in; UG says there's an underlying deep structure common to all languages; conflict". But of course there is no conflict; every language has its own grammatical and etymological idiosyncrasies, whether deep structure exists or not, and these idiosyncrasies are the fuel for S/W. The existence of deep structure cannot refute the fact that languages differ in significant ways, any more than a proof of S/W would disprove the existence of deep structure common to all languages. 48. lojbab: (responding to 43.) Whether UG is 'real', a question better discussed by others, I know of no useful evidence for the claim [that UG forbids unambiguous languages]. That there is no unambiguous language today is irrelevant, since nearly all languages evolved from some earlier language, interacting with other languages, etc. Most sources of ambiguity probably can be tied to these evolutionary processes. Lojban might also succumb to such ambiguity, but as an a priori language constructed after the printing press, having (unlike other languages) a 37 49. dan: (continuation of 1., from 43.) In the unlikely difficult clusters like *td or *fz; we also limit which event that a native Lojban speaker ever exists, it will consonant clusters can be used initially to a subset. probably actually be speaking its parent native language Pauses and glottal stops are the "same" in Lojban in the with some version of Lojban vocabulary. sense that they are allophones. In German, the phones [r] and [R] are the "same" in exactly the same sense: they are 50. cowan: (responding to 49.) I presume you mean allophones of /r/ in free variation. "parents' native language". As I mentioned above, its parents might not have the same native language. 60. lojbab: (responding to 55.) Tone is reflected poorly or not-at-all in writing systems of the world, as is pitch 51. dan: (continuation of 1., from 49.) But even that is and speech rhythm. Audio-visual isomorphism therefore unlikely since even the phonology (like everything else in precluded these being critical to disambiguation and we the language) is arbitrary, and it is questionable how easy chose better ways to convey the equivalent meanings. In it would be for a child to learn. each case where we did so, a similar mechanism is found in some natural languages. For example, in French "est-ce 52. rjohnson: (responding to 51.) Isn't the phonology of que" almost exactly parallels Lojban 'xu'. any language arbitrary in this sense? No language avails itself of all the possibilities. 61. dan: (responding to 60.) Which is one of the many reasons that linguists concentrate on spoken language. 53. dan: (responding to 52.) Yes, but certain combinations are unlikely to occur. 62. lojbab: (continuation of 60.) Pause in Lojban is used only to preserve morphological distinctions. For example, 54. cowan: (responding to 53.) I don't understand this you must pause before a [word-initial] vowel to protect claim. The phonology is the least arbitrary thing about against it being absorbed into the previous word either as the language. Lojban has six vowels and 18 consonants, all a final vowel in a consonant-final word or as a diphthong. of which are exceedingly familiar and found in many A glottal stop provides similar separation of sounds; hence languages world-wide: German, for example, has all of them it is phonemically equivalent to a pause. (although Lojban 'j' is rare in German and found mostly in In neither case was the decision arbitrary; we had a good borrowings from French). On the suprasegmental level, reason for each. This is in general true throughout Lojban Lojban has two levels of stress (primary and weak) and - a decision to choose one form over many was primarily to significant pauses; where "pause" may represent either a achieve unambiguity. In other circumstances, we chose the complete silence or a glottal stop. Tone is not signifi- least restrictive form possible (thus making tense, number, cant, as mentioned above. gender, etc. optional and hence more highly marked forms). 55. dan: (responding to 54.) See what I mean about 63. dan: (continuation of 1., from 51.) In typically arbitrary? The Lojban engineers have decided that tone blundering fashion, the Lojban engineers have ignored this isn't important and that pauses are the same as glottal issue, concentrating entirely on the learnability issue for stops. This is lunacy! SECOND language acquisition, that is, adults learning a second language, with no native competence. 56. rjohnson: (responding to 54. and 55, also 1.-8.) By the way, both of you [cowan and dan] are abusing the term 64. cowan: (responding to 63.) (You raise an interesting "tone". You're talking about pitch. Tone, by definition, side issue here. Do you argue a priori that persons involves significant pitch contrasts. You can't have tone learning a language as adults cannot achieve competence be unimportant in a language. If morphemes are systemati- which is empirically indistinguishable from that of native cally contrastive in pitch, the language has tone; if not, speakers?) there is no tone. 65. dan: (responding to 64.) I guess I do. A Native 57. dan: (responding to 56.) Guilty as charged. Sorry French speaker might learn English well enough to be about that. indistinguishable from a native English speaker, but he or she will not have native competence. In other words, you 58. cowan: (responding to 56.) Thanks for this correction. cannot ask that speaker a question regarding something like say, contraction and get a truthful answer. 59. cowan: (responding to 55.) Of course it's arbitrary in the sense that we select some features of the total human 66. daj: (responding to 65.) Even worse, you would never phonological repertoire and not others, but so does every be able to use this speaker as a guinea pig in a SWH test, natural language. The phonemes we use are found in many since he would be a native speaker of two languages, so his natural languages, and there exists at least one natural perception of the world would be conditioned by both. This language (viz. German) that contains all of them. The would be true for any bilingual speaker, it seems to me. consonant clusters and diphthongs we use are also all to be So you'll never be able to test the SWH until you have a found in natural languages. We go to some pains to prevent "pure strain" of Lojban speakers. 38 67. cowan: (responding to 66.) Some Lojbanists agree, and there is a theory or not? Is he claiming that certain say we will need to wait for a second generation. Another combinations won't occur? He seems to be claiming that viewpoint is that by having people who speak Lojban has combinations that cannot occur but gives no Lojban+English, Lojban+French, Lojban+Vietnamese, examples. He'll have trouble finding them. Lojban+Navajo, etc. etc. we will be able to factor out the We did indeed take phonological universals into account Lojban contribution when compared with people bilingual in in several ways. In the first place, as John Cowan two natural languages. mentions, the set of permitted sounds was selected as a ("Bilingual" here means "bilingual within the acquisition subset of those found in many languages. We constrained period".) consonant clusters by restrictive rules that recognize phonological properties like voiced/voiceless assimilation 68. dan: (continuation of 65.) E.g. In English, one can and included redundancy as a criteria in assigning words, contract words like "he" and "is", but only in particular reducing the number of minimal pairs distinctions. We circumstances. Hence: added the apostrophe to prevent unwanted diphthongization; it represents devoicing of the glide between two adjacent He's a nice boy vowels. Isn't he a nice boy?/* yes, he's In addition, the frequency of sounds in predicate words should statistically parallel the sum of the corresponding The starred sentence is ungrammatical, the contraction is frequencies in our six source languages. (For those not acceptable in that position. It is acceptable in the unfamiliar, most of Lojban's predicate root words are first sentence. A native French speaker who knows English formed by maximizing the appearance of phoneme patterns might be able to guess on that, but he or she certainly found in those source languages weighted by approximate would NOT have a reliable intuition on the matter. number of speakers.) I would say that more time has been spent overall during 69. rjohnson: (responding to 68.) I have to agree with Dan Loglan/Lojban's history on the interaction between here, sort of. I don't think the distinction to be made is phonology and morphology than on any other single feature between L1 and L2 competence, though, but between critical- of the language. This is probably because it is the best period learning and post-critical-period (or "adult") documented feature of the design and also the most easily learning. I think it's pretty clear that they're two compared to other languages. different processes (though of course they may share some features). An adult learner may indeed learn a language 74. cowan: (responding to 63, continuation of 70.) What we well-enough to pass an operationalist sort of test (i.e., don't know is whether the grammar is learnable by a child. be indistinguishable from a native speaker), but shouldn't We won't know that until the experiment is tried, first by be taken as a reliable judge of grammaticalness. raising a bilingual or trilingual child, and then eventu- ally as part of a community of monolingual speakers. 70. cowan: (responding to 63, continuation of 64.) We know that the phonology is learnable by children, because it is 75. lojbab: (responding to 63.) We've hardly ignored the a subset of phonologies which children can and do learn. question [of learnability by children]. However, from what We have every reason to believe that the vocabulary is I've read, children learn languages from adult role models. learnable: the words are similar in morphology to those We need adult fluent speakers therefore in order to teach existing in natural languages, and the consonant clusters children. Within the next two decades at least, all such and diphthongs are all to be found in natural languages. adults will be 2nd language speakers. So why not concentrate now on what we can do something about. 71. dan: (responding to 70.) Yes, but if there is a theory of phonological universals, then it is argued that certain 76. dan: (responding to 75.) My point from my first combinations simply won't ever occur. Did the Lojban posting on has been that I can't imagine any child being engineers take this into account, accept at the most able to acquire something as baroque as Lojban in its rudimentary level? I doubt it. current form. My understanding of acquisition is that non- ambiguity is sacrificed in favor of learnability. 72. cowan: (responding to 71.) What do you call "rudimentary"? 77. cowan: (responding to 76.) Maybe so. After all, the English my daughter spoke at the age of two was hardly [Brief summary of Lojban phonology omitted.] "acceptable" as a full adult English, although now (at three) her English is clearly acceptable (she seems to be a The rules are arbitrary, yes, but I should like to be bit in advance of her age-mates in this respect). There is shown wherein they are unlearnable. Furthermore, they need no reason to think that a Lojban-speaking child would be to be known only to people inventing new words: several of different. them are relaxed for borrowings and names. In one respect, some of the simpler Lojban constructions like observatives (bare predicators without arguments) are 73. lojbab: (responding to 71.) An interesting more analogous to young-child linguistic forms. The conditional, that first sentence. Is Dan claiming that English utterance "Dog!" is a bit deviant, in that English- 39 speakers would think it rather odd for an adult to say (3) distributional irregularity - certain combinations of simply "Dog!" on seeing a dog, but for a child this forms (or features) are not permitted, for instance when utterance would be quite acceptable. The exact Lojban obligatory phonological changes eliminate some phone(me) translation "gerku", on the other hand, is fully combinations; grammatical and not at all deviant. (4) form class irregularity - it is not possible to distinguish forms or their categories directly from their 78. lojbab: (responding to 76.) Baroque? Compared to pronunciation, as when a phonological change is extended natural languages, Lojban is incredibly simple, and from word-internal to cross word boundaries, making it more children acquire natural languages (else they would not be difficult to tell where words begin and end. 'natural'). Now whether Lojban will be seen as simple to a child is a valid question, but there is no reason to Then it's interesting to catalog the various ways that believe otherwise, and we'll know soon enough. changes which remedy one sort of irregularity may create How can non-ambiguity be sacrificed in favor of others. learnability in natural languages acquisition? They aren't unambiguous in the first place. To whatever extent there 81. lojbab: (responding to 80.) Each of these has a IS unambiguity, the sheer complexity and irregularity of corresponding 'ambiguity', as well, in which various most of the language would overwhelm this. Lojban, being degrees of inconsistency and inconstancy exist in the rules so much simpler to express unambiguously, MIGHT be able to for building and interpreting forms of each of these types. be acquired unambiguously or at least relatively so (with Lojban has defined regularity and unambiguity in the last the child growing into more accurate usage with age and three. We can expect to directly observe the causes and understanding just as children of the natural languages effects that result in changes in these areas. do). 82. lojbab: (continuation of 75., responding to 63.) There 79. dan: (responding to 78.) I was suggesting that are several Lojbanists that have indicated intent to try to ambiguous languages are easier to learn than unambiguous raise their children as bilingual Lojban/natural-language ones. There aren't any unambiguous natural languages that speakers, probably the best that can and should be I know of, so it's difficult to test this. attempted until/unless Lojban proves its value. I cer- An unambiguous language would require enough additional tainly wouldn't ask anyone to raise children solely Lojban- baggage, that it would make learning it unwieldy. An speaking; it would smack of human-experimentation to me (an ambiguous language has fewer rules. And just for the issue I'm fairly sensitive on). record, let's get things straight with regard to our definition of "rules". By rules, I mean rules that are 83. dan: Some Lojban propaganda claims that the language used to characterize the language, not rules in the pre- has been characterized by a transformational grammar, but scriptive sense. this has never actually been demonstrated, and seems quite The average child learns his or her language (barring unlikely, since I would imagine that a native speaker would language disorders or highly unusual circumstances) quite be required to characterize a Lojban-user's competence. rapidly, ambiguity and all. Since there probably will never BE a native Lojban speaker, As to whether Lojban is baroque or not, the question is how can you possibly ask one whether XXXX is an allowable this: If there were hypothetical native speakers of sentence or word of his or her language? Current Lojban Lojban, how complicated would an abstract characterization speakers are of no use, because they do not have such intu- of their competence be? If such an abstract itions about the language any more than a fluent second- characterization were more complicated than a similar language speaker of French (a French speaker whose native characterization of say, Klammath, then I would stand by my language is say Hindi) would have such intuitions about assertion. French. Of course, one might beg the question and ask whether such abstractions are meaningful at all (as the Schankians 84. cowan: (responding to 83.) This illustrates a do), but that's a whole other ball o' wax (quite confusion between natural and constructed languages. In a interesting too). natural language, the source of competence is the native speaker's intuition. In a constructed language, during the 80. lee: (responding to 76.) The discussion of construction phase (which Lojban is still in, though irregularity might profit from distinguishing types of rapidly coming to the end of it), competence is defined by irregularity: the constructor. A grammatical Lojban sentence is what we say it is, where "what we say" is defined by the baselined (1) semantic irregularity - no one-to-one correspondence vocabulary lists and machine grammar. The reference for between form and meaning, as for example when phonological syntactic correctness is a parsing program, and when a Loj- changes produce variations in the form of a stem; banist utters something the program can't parse, we say (2) morphological irregularity - no uniform way of that he has made an "error". deriving related words, as in the examples of archaic paradigms; 85. dan: (responding to 84.) Once again, completely arbitrary. In English, or any other natural language, 40 grammaticalness is also defined by what we can say and 'standard language' is, which is distinct from what we say understand. "I ain't got none" is perfectly grammatical, and understand. (Of course, the definition of standard because people use and understand it all the time. Only language varies from country to country, too. British English teachers and guys like John Simon sit around and speakers would even less accept some of Dan's Americanisms, contemplate (by their own arbitrary standards) whether or and in some cases might misunderstand them. (Actually, not it's okay to split infinitives and use "hopefully" there is some variation among 'standard Englishes', as right. The rest of us just do it. well, as evidenced by differences in the various published style manuals.)) 86. cowan: (responding to 85.) Correct, and therefore for In addition, each language has registers, in some of a natural language like English, the only way to determine which certain constructs may be permitted, but which in the grammar is by {in,intro}spection. But this has nothing others are unacceptable. Try using "I ain't got none." in to do with the grammar being in transformational form, i.e. a journal paper. In other languages, such as Japanese, a set of PS rules generating a deep structure with a set of registers are so structured and formalized as to almost T rules generating the surface structure from them. Such a make for independent languages. Understanding is not a grammar has not been fully worked out for Lojban, but is sufficient criteria for grammaticalness.. clearly not impossible in principle. It also happens to be the case that PS rules are sufficient to generate the whole 91. dan: (responding to 90.) This is where I disagree most of the language's surface structure all by themselves strongly. To my mind, grammaticalness. is determined (probably not true of English), although the PS-only solely by whether a member of a speech community finds a version of the grammar which we have now baselined does not given utterance acceptable. Members of my speech community explain semantic equivalences of different structures. will, if they put their biases aside, admit that "I ain't got none" is a perfectly acceptable sentence. 87. cowan: (continuation of 84.) But this will not always be so. When the language is fully defined and baselined, 92. cowan: (responding to 91.) Northrop Frye tells a story it will be "launched" and the normal processes of about going to a hardware store and asking for something or linguistic change will be allowed to operate. We expect other, and being told "We haven't got any". The speaker that some grammatical forms, vocabulary items, etc. will be then glanced at Frye and added, "We haven't got none." "pruned" because nobody uses them. They will remain in the This remark, says Frye, has what literary critics call formal language definition, available to all speakers in texture: it means 1) we haven't got any, and 2) you look the same sort of way that archaic grammar or vocabulary to me like a schoolteacher, and nobody's going to catch me forms are available to speakers of natural languages: viz. talking like one of those. if they take the trouble to look them up. At that time it The "bias" in question is part of an English-speaker's will be appropriate to consult human speakers (and AI competence, which is not limited to separating the programs, if any) to investigate correct linguistic intelligible from the unintelligible, but also can separate behavior a posteriori. what kinds of grammatical constructions may be used by what speakers in what situations. *"Lazy the jumps fox quick 88. dan: (responding to 87.) Org! What a mess! "Correct" dog brown over the" is ungrammatical in all situations. linguistic behavior? Lojban will be a linguistic *"Me see she" is probably also ungrammatical in all battlefield with prescriptivists running around telling situations, although perfectly intelligible. *"Mama like people that they can't say such-and-such a sentence, pretty spoon" is good toddler-English but unacceptable because it can't be parsed by Lojban's computationally adult-English. *"I ain't got none" is ungrammatical in sound grammar (verified by a genuine computer!). some dialects (mine, for example) and entirely grammatical in others. *"For all x, for some y, such that x is a man, 89. cowan: (responding to 88.) Don't be silly. Of course such that y is a fish, x loves y" is grammatical to me, but Lojbanists can do that if they want to, just as speakers of many native speakers would reject it as almost as English and other languages can if they want to. Again, unintelligible as my first example. I have asterisked all you are ignoring the difference between a language that is of these examples as ungrammatical for some speakers in born a priori and one that isn't. After the language is some situations. delivered from the womb, anything can and quite probably will happen in the way of changes, which will not be 93. lojbab: (continuation of 90.) And of course, for many dictated from above. nations there are academies that dictate the standard language for that nation (I use nations instead of 90. lojbab: (responding to 85.) Not true for English, languages since, for example, Brazil has an academy really, nor for all natural languages. English is of separate from that of Portugal, although both work together course not even a single language in the sense that there at times.) English has no academy, but this is an are many dialects spoken around the world [not all 100% exception. Therefore we end up with individuals setting mutually understandable]. Many of these do not use themselves up as a self-appointed 'academy'. constructs found in the 'standard language', even though they are obviously understood by their listeners. But how 94. dan: (responding to 93.) Thank God we don't have such could we say this if we didn't have a concept of what the academies. Take a look at how much attention is paid to 41 such academies too. French speakers are constantly being 101. dan: (continuation of 99.) Besides, many advised to avoid English borrowings like "Picque-Nique" and prescriptivists have used the same arguments against "Le Weekend" or "Fair du ski", but they use them constantly various "slang" forms. The argument against "double and of course they should be allowed to if they want to. negatives" is that they are "illogical". The fact that no one seems to have a bit of trouble understanding them 95. cowan: (responding to 94.) Discussions of "allowing doesn't matter I suppose. people to do things" are political, not linguistic. Linguistics as such is silent on the subject of what people 102. lojbab: (continuation of 90.) Some other 'natural "should" do, permit, or forbid. languages' are indeed defined exactly as Lojban is, by an a "Does a rock roll down hill because it wants to or priori 'committee' that selected the valid forms. Norse, because it has to?" An animist would plump for the former Modern Hebrew, and several African languages were defined reply; most educated Westerners, probably the latter. But by some nationalists taking features from other languages a pure operational scientist would reply "Neither. Rocks used by the target population (and in the case of Hebrew, simply do roll down hill, that's all." from incomplete knowledge of a dead language), and arbitrary features sometimes where the several languages 96. lojbab: (continuation of 90.) This does not make collided. These all became living natural languages. Why 'academies', or language prescription 'wrong'. Dan's can't Lojban, which is merely doing the same on a grander libertarian view of language is understandable given his scale? American and English language cultural values. In addition, there is a difference between the 103. dan: (responding to 102.) I would imagine that all of prescriptive/descriptive debate from the point of view of them underwent creolization, which seems to be nature's way linguists as opposed to that of regular speakers. Most of smoothing things out, linguistically. If Lojban people, for example, expect a dictionary to be prescrip- develops a native speech community, then it will tive, even thought the linguists who write them disagree. undoubtedly do the same, probably in all of the worst sorts of ways (the moral equivalent of "I ain't got none" in 97. dan: (responding to 96.) I prefer "anarchistic" to Lojban) and Lojban will be yet another zany, irregular, "libertarian" for personal reasons :-) ambiguous, beautiful language. In other words, what's the point? 98. lojbab: (continuation of 90.) Lojban has a valid reason (unambiguity) to prescribe its standard form. If 104. cowan: (responding to 103.) Well, perhaps you are Dan chooses to learn Lojban, and then chooses to deviate right. Then we'll have learned something. And perhaps you from those standard forms, he may be expanding the are wrong. And then we'll have learned something else. language. Of course, he also may have trouble getting his That's what makes this experimental linguistics. computer to understand him. Since ideally Lojban's target 'speaker' population may include computers, failure to 105. cowan: (continuation of 87.) There will also be express himself so that the computer understands him growth in the language: technical terms in all fields will (unambiguously) means Dan is speaking ungrammatically even be borrowed and Lojbanized as needed; new compounds will be by his own definition. freely created, and it is even possible that new grammatical constructions will be built by usage, although 99. dan: (responding to 98.) Whaaaat? The goal of Natural we have really tried to be quite comprehensive in this Language Understanding should be for the system to domain. understand human languages, not for human speakers to alter I don't understand what the stuff about transformational their speech so that a computer can understand it. Since grammar vs. any other kind has to do with this issue. A we've already established that Lojban isn't unambiguous, transformational grammar is simply certain kind of formal any Lojban NLP system is already going to be having a hissy description. Doubtless many natural languages exist of fit over plastic cats. which no transformational grammar has ever been given: do TG [transformational grammar - a linguistics theory] 100. cowan: (responding to 99.) Of course. But such a advocates doubt that such grammars are possible a priori? Lojban NLP can 1) recognize unambiguously that it has detected an ambiguity, 2) ask for help, and 3) get an 106. dan: (responding to 105.) TG is a formal description unambiguous response. If a Lojban computer sees "slasi that requires native speakers to confirm. Even you have mlatu" in its input, it can ask "lu slasi mlatu li'u admitted that there are no native speakers of the language. ta'unai pei", literally "quote plastic cat unquote expand- How can there be a transformational account of a language the-metaphor how?" and expect a response such as "lo mlatu without native speakers? Yet Bob LeChevalier told me point poi ke'a cidja lo slasi", literally "a cat such-that it blank that such a transformational account did exist. eats plastic", or else "lo mlatu poi zo'e zbasu ke'a lo slasi", literally "a cat such-that something makes it from 107. cowan: (responding to 106.) I believe what Bob meant plastic". And other responses are of course also possible. to convey was that an investigation had been made to see whether the semantic equivalence of certain Lojban constructions could be represented by T rules which would 42 transform certain syntax trees into other trees in a The presence of the trace in (2) between "to" and "want" meaning-preserving way. Indeed, this can be done, although blocks "wanna" contraction. it has not been done for every detail of the language. Again, I see no difference between TG formal descriptions 110. rjohnson: (continuation of 108.) The (now moribund) and others in this respect. Every formal description of a theory of Transformational Grammar, on the other hand, is a natural language requires speakers of that language to set of claims about linguistic competence, largely confirm or disconfirm it, but a constructed language is abandoned by generativists in favor of GB [this, as well as launched with an a priori formal description from which (or other jargon terms in this paragraph, is a linguistic from simplified/clarified forms of which) new speakers theory of grammar] and other systems. Among these claims learn. is the idea that the basic data are the grammaticalness. Think of Lojban as being spoken by people who live so far judgements of native speakers. But this has nothing to do away that we can't ever go there to talk with them, but with the formal notion of transformations, and can be they have sent us some of their Lojban as a Second Language applied in LFG, GPSG, dependency, or just about any other materials used for instructing their neighbors in their formal framework as well. The original poster [cowan], language. Magically, these materials have been translated quite properly, kept the two levels separate. into English. Some of us now learn this language and begin to speak it. Our children hear us speaking it and either 111. dan: (responding to 110.) Well you're probably right learn it natively (i.e. as other languages are learned) or again. I'm not a professional linguist yet - only a else they don't. Either way, a datum for experimental Cognitive Science type. linguistics. A board of psychologists then administers some tests to us and our children to see if either 112. rjohnson: (continuation of 110, also responding to population thinks differently (in some sense) from a 46.) Of course you [assume UG]. You're an MIT student. matched control group. Another datum for experimental For most of the rest of the world, however, the jury is linguistics. still out, and it's a mistake to assume what you're trying Many generations pass and the language undoubtedly to prove. changes. All this history is forgotten. A Linguist (capital L) comes on the scene and decides to study this 113. dan: (responding to 112.) I'm not actually, I just language called Lojban; perhaps he is himself a native post from here :-( I don't want to misrepresent myself as speaker. He records, using whatever linguistic theory is an MIT linguist. I studied cognitive science as an current at that time, a model of the grammar (a posteriori) undergrad at Hampshire College, with a strong bias towards of the language as it is spoken then. An archaeologist linguistics. As you can see, I play fast and loose with digs up a copy of the original Lojban textbook, machine some of the terminology. grammar, etc., and historical linguistics goes to work As for assuming what we're trying to prove, isn't that reconstructing the way the language has changed. the crux of this argument? Most Chomskian linguists assume Why not? UG, and most Lojbanists assume Sapir/Whorf. In the words of The Brady Bunch "I guess we've all learned a valuable 108. rjohnson: (responding to 106.) Dan, you're conflating lesson". the formal (mathematical) and the psychological issues here. A transformational grammar is simply a class of 114. kimba: (responding to 113.) The point was supposed to formal device for characterizing (generating) sentences. be, if you are slamming someone else's assumptions, the it has nothing to do with competence. You could (and do) least you can do is write your own in black ink in a clear have transformational grammars for characterizing computer and legible hand, rather than saying (effectively) "this is languages, strings of arbitrary symbols, etc. inconsistent with UG and therefore wrong". As I ought, if I "Transformational" belongs in the same paradigm as "phrase were actually saying anything:-) I find neither [UG nor structure", "finite state", "indexed" and so on; these are SWH] particularly convincing or illuminating. classes of grammars, not empirical theories. 115. lojbab: (responding to 106.) The claim I made is that 109. dan: (responding to 108.) I suppose you're right John Parks-Clifford, a linguist involved with Loglan since again, although perhaps my studies in Montague Grammar have 1975, told me that he investigated 1970's Loglan using TG made me lose sight of psychological vs. mathematical techniques during the 70's and was able to demonstrate to distinctions :-) Seriously though, one does rely on his own satisfaction that all features of Loglan were grammaticalness. judgements when trying to determine if a amenable to TG analysis, and that he found no 'unusual' certain movement is viable: for example in the case of transforms. More recently, a student in Cleveland has been "wanna" contraction: attempting to develop a more formal TG description of the language. This will undoubtedly take a while, but he re- 1 a. Which movie(t) do you want to see? (t) ported to me earlier this year that not only had he found b. Which movie do you wanna see? nothing unusual, he had identified some elegant features of 2 a. Which team(t) do you want (t) to win? the language using TG techniques. The features he reported b. *Which team do you wanna win? are indeed consistent with the language definition, and in- cluded aspects that the student had not been taught (i.e. 43 that we had not put into any published documents that the goes with them (there is an entire set of paralinguistic student had received. grunts for expressing emotions), and so on. 116. dan (conclusion of 1., from 63.): Ultimately, the 7. daj: (responding to 6.) Since every known language (as enterprise of Lojban is at best an intellectual puzzle, and far as I know) has a set of required categories, they must perhaps on this level, it is interesting. To learn a fulfill some function. Again, real speakers would make the "language" (perhaps "code" would be better) like Lojban, categories compulsory and create something different from based on principles of logic can be seen as the equivalent the original design. of a Pig-Latin for intellectuals and engineers. 8. cowan: (responding to 7.) Maybe, maybe not. Since the non-required categories are expressed by marked forms ________________________ (using the particles), sentences that don't express Subject: Lojban: is it naive? categories are always possible. Again, they might come to seem archaic or childish, but that's a second-order effect. Participants: When a 2-year-old says "Dog!" we usually consider that a [email protected] (John Cowan) bit deviant, but the Lojban literal translation "gerku" is [email protected] (David A. Johns) fully grammatical Lojban - a predicate with all arguments elliptically omitted. 1. [The following exchange between cowan and daj began with a one-liner from daj that Lojban was "naive". cowan wrote 9. daj: (continuation of 7.) Another point. A few weeks back privately to ask "Why do you say that?"] ago you posted a list of Lojban pronouns. It struck me then that this paradigm was probably too rich for human 2. daj: Well, the three things that jump out at me right language. This is just a gut feeling, but it seems to me away are: (1) You can't design a culture-free language. that in real languages the number of elements in a con- Simply the choice of categories to represent in the trastive set is pretty severely limited. language (tense, aspect, definite- indefinite, etc.) are culture-bound. In addition, there's a lot of talk in that 10. cowan: (responding to 9.) Depends on what you mean by description about using metaphor to extend the bare bones "contrastive". The 43 Lojban pronouns are indeed of the language. Can there be anything more culture-bound contrastive in the sense of being interchangeable in the than metaphor (not the mechanism, but the choices of grammar, but they aren't semantically interchangeable. images)? They fall into several categories: personal, bound-vari- able, free-variable, question, relativized argument, 3. cowan: (responding to 2.) Absolutely correct. Lojban reflexive, demonstrative, pro-utterance, pro-argument, and is not a culture-free language; every language creates its indefinite. Within each category there are only a few own culture if the SWH is correct, and we assume it correct pronouns (or "anaphora" more technically - "ba'ivla" in (its falsity is the null hypothesis) for purposes of the Lojban). Grammatically, "do" and "dei" are Lojban experiment. Assuming SWH, then lei lojbo 'the mass interchangeable, but no one will confuse "you" (the of those pertaining to Lojban' will create their own listener) with "this utterance I am now uttering"! culture, with its own metaphors and characteristic idioms. 11. daj: (continuation of 7., from 9.) I can see that it 4. daj: (responding to 3.) Then what's the point of the would be possible in some cases to have people speaking language? All you would end up with is a bunch of different dialects of the same language, where each dialect creolized Lojban daughter languages, wouldn't you? over-specified some categories from the point of view of other dialects. After all, we don't really have much 5. cowan: (responding to 4.) We hope not. Of course in trouble understanding Chinese speakers of English who the very long term that can happen to any language: Latin simply eliminate the verb tense system and replace it with split into lots of daughters, some of which are more or adverbs. But I don't think this would work with the less heavily influenced by other languages (Rumanian being pronouns, since a listener wouldn't know what any given the prime example). The idea is that Lojban ways of pronoun meant without knowing the entire set. thought (assuming there are such things) will influence the creation of Lojbanic culture. 12. cowan: (responding to 11.) Correct. On the other hand, it may be that lots of the ba'ivla don't come up 6. cowan: (continuation of 3.) Lojban deals with the much. For example "da'e" meaning "a far future utterance" category problem (which we refer to as the "metaphysical probably won't be used very often, and someone who doesn't assumptions" problem) by minimizing required categories. understand it or even recognize it may still be quite a Tense, aspect, and definiteness are optional categories of fluent speaker. One can speak English fluently without discourse in the language, but can be represented when knowing "thou", for example, although certainly it is a needed. We can also represent things like the observa- personal pronoun contrasting with "I" and "you" and the tional status of assertions, the emotional attitude which rest. The occasions for its use (in Modern English) just aren't that common. 44 Even with all kinds of contrastive stress and artificial 13. daj: (continuation of 2.) (2) If you're going to intonation breaks we can't read even slightly complicated design a language that people are actually going to speak, math formulas so that they can be written down correctly. you're going to have to deal with whatever it is that leads human languages to be the way they are. One obvious 18. cowan: (responding to 17.) Lojban has lots of kinds of universal of real language is a floating equilibrium parentheses: "ke" and "ke'e" for Boolean connective between ambiguity and redundancy. If you want to design a groupings, "vei" and "ve'o" for strictly language without ambiguity, you'll have to figure out what numerical/mathematical parentheses, "to" and "toi" for role ambiguity plays and compensate for the loss. There discursive parentheses (like these). These can be stacked are many other characteristics like this, such as why up as required. Of course, if things get too complicated semantically external predicates like negation and tense people may not be able to understand what is said, but En- tend to become reduced and attached to internal pieces of a glish has that problem as well. "The cheese that the mouse sentence, etc. that the man that the woman married chased ate rotted" is grammatical, but not intelligible due to stack overflow in 14. cowan: (responding to 13.) Lojban is not free of the listener. But the words do exist as a regular part of ambiguity, only of phonological and syntactic ambiguity. the language: if the worst comes to the worst, the listener could write down what is said verbatim, pass it through a 15. daj: (responding to 2.) First phonological ambiguity. machine parser, and figure out exactly what is bracketed In your original posting you gave examples which seemed to with what. This ability could be quite useful for things indicate that Lojban words were polysyllabic, with like drafting regulations, which are notoriously ridden syllable-initial stress. I assume that your claim that with unintentional ambiguity: having a parser looking over analysis of the input stream into words was unambiguous has your shoulder as you write such a thing would help you in to depend on that stress placement - in other words, a word seeing ways in which your listener/reader could get begins where a stress occurs and includes all following confused, and clarifying them. unstressed syllables. But in natural languages, there are unstressed words - clitics - plus other uses of stress for 19. daj: (continuation from 15., from 17.) Also, once you phrase boundary identification, discourse function, etc. allow idiomatization into the language, you're going to How are you going to prevent phonological ambiguity from have syntactic reanalysis, which will produce syntactic creeping into Lojban? ambiguity. For instance, every language has some way of embedding one sentence inside another, and as far as I 16. cowan: (responding to 15.) I must have misled you. know, they all have ways of reducing the information in the Lojban stress is as follows: stress on content words embedded sentence. For instance, take a structure like (I ("brivla") is penultimate. All root brivla are two- like (I swim)), which can be realized as either "I like syllabled, so stress appears to be initial. swimming" or "I like to swim." It's pretty clear that the Structure words ("cmavo") are one or two syllables and action indicated by "swim" is subordinate to the main verb may be stressed freely. A structure word with final stress "like." On the other hand, I don't think anyone would immediately followed by a brivla must have a separating analyze "I am swimming" as (I am (I swim)). Here we think pause (which can be a full pause or just a glottal stop). of "am" as being a marker on the main verb, so that the Thus in "le bridi", "bridi" has penultimate stress; if "le" structure is [something like] (I (am swim)). But both is unstressed it can be proclitic [sounded together with structures are realized in actual speech as V-V sequences, the following word], whereas if it is stressed a pause is and there are many such sequences that are hard to required to forbid the reading "lebri di". classify: "am to," "am going to," "am supposed to," etc. Names have free stress, which must be indicated by This sort of reanalysis is extremely common and probably capitalization in writing when it is not penultimate. unavoidable in any real language. Names are always followed by pause, and must be preceded by either pause or one of the cmavo "la", "lai", "la'i", or 20. cowan: (responding to 19.) I'm not sure how to comment "doi" (the first three are articles, the last a vocative on this. However, I guess the best point I can make is marker). These same cmavo may not be embedded in names, so that in Lojban, the "surface structure" is quite close to "*doil" for "Doyle" is not a valid Lojban name; it would the "deep structure". We simply do not have things like have to be "do'il", roughly "Dough-heel". (The Lojban ' embedding and tense marking being realized with the same character represents IPA [h], or more accurately a forms. voiceless vowel glide.) (I like (I swim)) comes out "mi nelci le nu mi limna" which is "I like the event-of I swim". (I (am swim)) comes 17. daj: (continuation of 15.) And then there's syntactic out "mi ca limna" which is "I now swim". The first form ambiguity. Math/logic notation has an extremely powerful could be collapsed into "mi limna nelci" = "I swimly like", device for preventing ambiguity - parentheses. With which is one of the forms which is explicitly marked as parentheses you can resolve "old men and women" into either semantically ambiguous: the exact way in which the liking "((old men) and (women))" or "(old (men and women))." It's is a kind of swimming is not indicated. This process of hard to imagine anything like this in natural language that making a "tanru" (Lojban for "open compound") is a kind of could operate at more than one or two levels of embedding. Lojban transformation, and the current grammar does not ex- 45 press it - it is a grammar of surface structure alone, but sense of having exactly the same five places, although a surface structure that is more like the deep structure of "benji" (A transfers B to C from D via E) and "muvdu" (A other languages. This is the kind of embedding we call moves B from C to D via E) come close - the difference is "abstraction": there are also other embeddings, involving that "muvdu" and "klama" involve physical objects, whereas description, relativization, metalinguistic comments, etc. "benji" doesn't necessarily. But all Lojban predicates with the same number of places contrast in that they are 21. cowan: (continuation of 14.) Metaphors (which, as you freely substitutable, although perhaps nonsense-producing. say, are fundamental - they are Mandarin-type metaphors and really correspond more to nominal compounds in English) are 26. cowan: (continuation of 14., from 21.) Negation, semantically ambiguous, and there is also ambiguity in tense, etc. can be expressed either externally through the names and through the extensive use of ellipsis and semantics or internally through the grammar. Negation in defaults: the full translation of a simple utterance like particular has gotten a great deal of attention: we split mi klama is 'I/we go to somewhere, from somewhere, via some it into contradictory negation (with na or naku), contrary/ route, by some means'. polar/scalar negation (with a variety of particles for simple contrary, polar opposite, and "scale neutral"), and 22. daj: (responding to 21.) But as soon as you allow metalinguistic negation (with na'i). these metaphors, you've compromised universal comprehensibility, which I assume is one purpose of the 27. daj: (responding to 26.) Again, I think the evidence language. Do you think a Mongol tribesman would understand from natural language suggests that people won't tolerate "heart ache," "dog days," etc., or indeed would he have any very much paradigmatic indeterminacy. They will boil down way of knowing that "back stabber" wasn't to be taken all these choices to a few that seem particularly important literally? to them. 23. cowan: (responding to 22.) There is a subtle point 28. daj: (continuation of 2., from 13.) (3) You can't here. There is a marker for "figurative speech" which design a language "not based on any existing languages." would be used on "back stabber" and would signal "There is You might be able to choose totally arbitrary vocabulary, a culturally dependent construction here!" The intent is since vocabulary IS arbitrary, but interestingly enough, not that everything is instantly and perfectly comprehensi- Lojban doesn't do that (words are based on U. N. languages ble to someone who knows only the root words, but rather as I remember). But in syntax the choices are limited, and that non-root words are built up creatively from the roots. Lojban seems to opt for a word-order language rather than a Thus "heart pain" would refer to the literal heart and morphology language like Russian. Lojban is thereby biased literal pain; what would be ambiguous would be the exact toward languages that use word order to indicate structural connection between these two. Is the pain in the heart, relationships. because of the heart, or what? But "heart pain" would not be a valid tanru for "emotional pain", absent the 29. cowan: (responding to 28.) You remember correctly. figurative speech marker. It is "malglico" (#*$@ English). The relevant languages are Mandarin, English, Russian, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic, weighted according to the 24. daj: (continuation of 22.) In natural language words numbers of speakers, and using a phoneme-matching algorithm exist in paradigmatic sets: "No contrast, no content." The to assign words with the highest figures of merit relative meaning of "mi klama" would be determined in any single to the six languages. This mechanism is a "marketing dialect by the categories that had become compulsory in device" to make the vocabulary easier to learn for speakers that dialect. In other words, "I go" does not mean the of any of those languages, especially Mandarin and English. same thing as German "ich gehe," because in English it Word order plays a fairly limited role in determining contrasts with "I am going," while in German there is no meaning: it determines which arguments of predicates are such tense. which, but can be overridden. Lojban is really a particle language: almost everything about the grammar is determined 25. cowan: (responding to 24.) Each root word in Lojban by which particles are used and where. expresses an N-place predicate, and its meaning is defined by the significance of the N places. Thus "klama" is a 5- 30. daj: (responding to 29.) My mistake. But how do you place predicate meaning "A goes to B from C via route D by come up with a culture-free list of particles? means E". The Lojban design maintains that these five places are an essential part of the meaning of "klama", and 31. cowan: (responding to 30.) Again, we can't exactly. that any state of affairs not involving an agent, a We attempt to be superinclusive, as I said above. The list destination, an origin, a route, and a means is not validly of particles is large (~550) and if anybody comes up with a captured by the word "klama". Most roots have 1, 2, or 3 construct which cannot be handled by existing ones, we add places, and 5 is the maximum. Additional places (such as one. Hopefully this process is now complete. The last few the time, the location, the purpose, etc.) can be expressed things to come in included the observationals (which say as well by an extensible set of tags, but they are not "how the speaker knows", from Amerind languages), scalar considered essential to meaning. In the case of "klama" negation, and the tense system, which is quite there is no word which precisely "contrasts" with it in the comprehensive (it covers space location and aspect as well 46 as time). A few more may still need to be added to cover restriction, but they should be able to understand them the needs of mathematics. passively if they are fluent in the language. 32. daj: (continuation of 2., from 28.) I could go on. 39. cowan: (responding to 32.) Coordination and One obvious area is how Lojban indicates discourse subordination are both fully supported. Lojban features functions like old and new information components of a redundant structures: there are often many ways to say sentence (or clause), whether it is iconic in tense "the same thing" semantically. Lojban's specified grammar sequences, whether it prefers coordination or is not a transformational one, but that is not to say that subordination, etc., etc. All these factors are going to a transformational grammar cannot exist or is trivial. make it look like particular languages. All of them are Lojban has a "deep structure" even though we didn't design going to have to be specified if the language isn't going it to! Usage will decide, for example, whether the to break up into dialects based on the way speakers of subordinating or coordinating versions of "A is true other languages implement unspecified features in their own because B is true" will become dominant. speech. 40. daj: (responding to 39.) But won't different versions 33. cowan: (responding to 32.) Discourse functions are become dominant in different areas? And if so, won't that handled by a large set of discursives, each of which has a defeat the purpose of Lojban? polar opposite: things like specifically/generally, hypothetically/actually, metaphorically/explicitly, etc. 41. cowan: (responding to 40.) Remember that the purposes of Lojban are threefold: 1) experimental investigation of 34. daj: (responding to 33.) These seem more pragmatic the SWH; 2) communications with computers; 3) international than discourse, but I admit the boundaries are fuzzy, and I communication. Purposes 2) and 3) are effective if may be using non-standard divisions. What I had in mind everybody can understand every construct (or almost every was the universally marked distinction between information construct) even if they do not often use them in their own that's already part of the conversation and information dialect. Purpose 1) probably cannot be satisfied until being introduced for the first time (in this conversation). some people begin to speak Lojban as native bilinguals. English does it with articles (the/a) and intonation, There are native Esperanto speakers, whose parents had no Russian and Chinese do it with word order, Japanese does it other common language. with particles, etc., etc. Learning Lojban involves finding out about a rich set of structural resources. Some of these will go over 35. cowan: (responding to 34.) The nearest Lojban automatically because they match your own language. Some equivalent to the "the/a" distinction is the "le/lo" will seem strange because they conflict with your language, distinction. "le finpe" means "the fish, the thing(s) I and you will have trouble with them, but you will use them describe as (a) fish". It may be a whale, or a mermaid, or anyway because they are the easiest, shortest ways of indeed my cat Freddy: as long as the listener understands saying what you mean in Lojban. The simple, unmarked forms what is meant, "le finpe" is correct; "le" is non-veridi- of Lojban are the ones least like natural languages: the cal. predicate grammar, the contradictory negation, and the "Lo finpe" on the other hand means "fish, a fish, some logical (Boolean) connectives. The things that are "in fish, the thing(s) that really is-a (are) fish". "Lo" is there to emulate natural languages" are more heavily marked veridical and makes a claim; sentences containing "lo" are and so more difficult to exploit. valid only if the thing is as described (they may be vacu- The best example of this that comes to mind is the form ously true otherwise, but probably a human listener would of embedded sentence called abstraction: the (I like (I consider them ill-formed semantically). swim)) above. This is unnatural in English, especially in complex constructions, but is the most painless in Lojban: 36. cowan: (responding to 32.) I don't understand "iconic you wrap an entire predication into "nu"/"kei" brackets in tense sequences." Could you explain further? (you can omit the "kei" if no ambiguity results) and the result is suitable as an argument for another predication. 37. daj: (responding to 36.) In many languages (Chinese is So you find yourself saying the Lojban for "I like the one, I believe) you can say "After I went home I went to event of I swim" even though that is not at all natural in bed" or "I went home before I went to bed," but you can't English, because Lojban makes it easy. You can ellipsize say "Before I went to bed I went home" or "I went to bed it to "mi nelci le nu limna", omitting the second "I" and after I went home." Clause sequence has to match time se- hoping the listener will reconstruct it correctly if you quence. I think it's even impossible in Chinese to say want, but you know that this is ambiguous (or more "I'm staying home because I've got a cold," since the accurately, vague) because of the omitted place in the presupposed cause has to precede the consequent. Many embedded predication. The listener is also aware of this other languages, of course, have no such restriction. vagueness, and can ask "ma limna" (Who swims?) to get clarification. 38. cowan: (responding to 37.) Lojban has no such restriction. Of course, Chinese-native Lojbanists might be 42. cowan: (responding to 32.) [Dialectization] is unlikely to construct Lojban sentences which violate this certainly a known problem. All of us speak more or less 47 pidginized versions of Lojban at best: we tend to exploit may be beyond human understanding (as is the case in features that have parallels in English or our own English also). languages. But the fact that the language is not very "large" means that it is possible to exploit the other re- 47. cowan: (continuation of 42.) In translating a story sources after a modest amount of learning and so prevent involving dialogue, for example, I found it necessary to Lojban from becoming an English-based code. The Lojban make frequent use of the observational particles of the metaphor malglico 'that #*%^ English' is applied to the language, which certainly had no counterpart in the English tendency to copy English-based constructions into Lojban. version. These mean things like 'I hear', 'I observe', 'I deduce', 'I know by cultural means', etc. Likewise, in 43. daj: (responding to 42.) As long as it remains a delivering the lines realistically, it was necessary to pidgin language, there should be no problem. But your supply paralinguistic attitudinal indicators, as Lojban original posting indicated that speakers should be able to makes no use of tones of voice (part of its phonological extend the language on their own. They can extend the unambiguity) that an English-speaker would surely use. vocabulary by combining the 1300 (?) basic words, and they can extend the expressive power of the language by 48. daj: (responding to 47.) Why? Have these categories improvising on the rather unspecialized grammatical become compulsory in your dialect? :) structure. But here is where I think things will necessarily go awry. Speakers who extend Lojban on their own will do it in accordance with their own already established linguistic habits, and they will categorize their vocabulary according to their semantic habits (this is only a weak SWH, by the way). To the extent that Lojban becomes a real vehicle for communication, it will take on the characteristics of existing natural languages. It may be fun to see to what extent this can be resisted, but I really think it's hopeless to think that it can be prevented altogether. 44. cowan: (responding to 43.) I agree about "prevented altogether". We do try to resist, though, sometimes by bending over backwards to avoid "malglico". Consider the following translation of Simonides' epigram at Thermopylae: "ko cusku fi le me la lakedaimon. doi klama do'u fe le nu mi nu tinbe le ri flalu kei morsi". Literally this is: "(Imperative!) You express to what-I-describe-as pertaining to Lakedaimon, O comer/goer, the event-of (we are (the event-of (something) obeys the laws of the-last-mentioned) kind-of dead)." I think you will admit that this slop is not English, and that the grammar underlying this Lojban utterance is sui generis and not something derived from English in the manner of a code. (I know no Greek, by the way, so my translation is from English not from Greek.) 45. daj: (continuation of 43.) The alternative, of course, would be to extend the language by design. But this would produce either a language that looked like some other human language (and therefore unlike most human languages) or a "PL/1" language, so rich in devices that subsets would develop, fragmenting the language into dialects. 46. cowan: (responding to 45.) Indeed, Lojban is comparable to PL/I or Ada in complexity. But its scope is much larger than any programming language's. If English were to be put in purely phrase-structure form, the result would be incomprehensibly large (to say nothing of desperately ambiguous). I don't believe that the entire repertoire of Lojban devices is beyond human learning, although some of the recursive complexities made possible 48 49. cowan: (responding to 48.) Of course not! But to make the meaning of the story clear to those who didn't belong Participants: to my culture, the observationals were indispensable. We [email protected] (Dan Parmenter) know that when somebody says "It must be the wind" in [email protected] (John Cowan) reference to a sound, this is a conclusion from incomplete [email protected] (Rod Johnson) evidence: but a Mongol tribesman might not. Hence the [email protected] (David M Tate) observational helps to make the cross-cultural meaning [email protected] (Bob LeChevalier) clear. For communication among, say, my own family (if they spoke Lojban), I would probably not need such a thing. 1. dan: S/W is pretty much disavowed by the linguistic orthodoxy in this country. I'm told that anthropologists 50. daj: (continuation of 2., from 28.) Frankly, I don't are still interested in it, but I don't know enough about think the designers of Lojban knew much about language. anthropology to say. 51. cowan: (responding to 50.) Guilty, especially in the 2. rjohnson: (responding to 1.) There is no linguistic beginning. But we've learned a lot, even if we take a non- orthodoxy in this country (and why do national boundaries standard slant on some things. Lojban/Loglan has a enter into this question anyway? There is certainly no "historical" dimension as well, even if the history is only linguistic orthodoxy in the world). Linguists are a pretty some 35 years old, and there are things in the language fractious bunch. There may be a generative orthodoxy that probably would be removed now or changed if an a (though I doubt it), but they don't speak for me. priori redesign were done. Lojban is not designed to be a "universal notation", just 3. dan: (responding to 2.) When was the last time you saw a language. Although it shares many features with other an article in any of the journals on Sapir-Whorf? languages, it is clearly not a dialect or a code or a jargon. It has its own feature set and its own 4. rjohnson: (responding to 3.) Well, I suppose it depends characteristic way of exploiting the set: the set is large, on which journals you look at. I've seen articles fairly but the language is still small because of its high degree recently that are "Whorfian" in some sense here and there. of regularity. It's certainly not a major topic in the field at present, Whether it is possible to internalize the language, in but there are any number of reasons that could be, includ- the sense of gaining Chomsky-competence, is still an open ing: issue. I believe it is possible: I am beginning to think - it's held to be clearly true; in the language's terms now, and so are several other ad- - it's held to be clearly false; vanced students; some of the paralinguistics are also - other ideas are exciting people nowadays; becoming internalized. - people are stumped as to how to approach it. My guess is that it's all of the above, variously. 52. daj: (responding to 51.) I have to apologize for my snotty attitude there. You've obviously done more homework 5. dan: (continuation of 3.) The introductory textbooks on than I thought at first. linguistics that I've looked at seem to cover the topic [of I still can't help thinking, though, that you're S/W] briefly, if at all, and then as a discredited underestimating the incredible complexity of human hypothesis. language, both in its use and in its potential for change. I doubt that you will be able to create a language free of 6. rjohnson: (responding to 5.) In the totally irregularity, ambiguity, etc. On the other hand, you may unscientific sample of textbooks on my desk, Lyons has a have a really interesting semi-laboratory experiment in the fairly sympathetic discussion of it; Finegan and Besnier process of creolization, and that would make the whole have only a page or so, mostly sympathetic but critical; thing worthwhile in itself. Eysenck's cognitive psych textbook gives it an extended but guarded treatment; Bolinger gives it a mild thumbs down 53. cowan: (responding to 52.) Well, new purposes always ("exaggerated") but is essentially in sympathy with some help. These letters are being passed to the president of form of the idea; and Akmajian et al. don't mention it the Logical Language Group, by the way - I hope you don't anywhere I can find. Everyone that mentions it finds it mind - for comments. attractive but in need of revision or special understanding. Finegan and Besnier, for instance, say: 54. daj: (responding to 53.) I'll try to watch more and "Today few scholars take the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis lit- snarl less. Thanks for the education. erally. Many linguists take the position that language may have some influence on thought but thought may also 55. cowan: (responding to 54.) je'e .uicai ("Roger. influence the structure of language" etc. If we strip away Happy!!!)"). the mealymouthedness (which I've spared you most of), they seem to be saying that the influence goes both ways, a position that neither Sapir nor Whorf would have any ________________________ objection to. Subject: Why use Lojban for S/W? 49 7. dan: (continuation of 3., from 5.) This doesn't 12. dan: (responding to 9., from 10.) I never said disprove anything, but it certainly seems to indicate a anything about "voting" on anything. lack of interest in the subject currently. I didn't mean to imply that all linguists were of one mind, but on this 13. rjohnson: (responding to 12.) But isn't that what topic, there seems to be a pretty general agreement, in orthodoxy amounts to? Chomsky was took a few highly what I've read. unorthodox positions once, and was roundly "outvoted" by the field. That changed. It's arguments that decide these 8. rjohnson: (responding to 7.) I'll agree there's not a things, and evidence (and funding, and ...), not which way whole lot of interest among the people who currently the wind is blowing in any given decade. Orthodoxy is dominate the field. This is not to say that those people fickle. 20 years ago everyone was into intrinsic rule are committed to a position on either side of the issue - ordering, squishes and (trans)derivational constraints. No it's just not relevant to their work. "Exotic" languages one talks about them now - but the underlying problems are are no longer the center of interest that they were in the still there waiting to be explored. Likewise the complex heyday of Sapir and Whorf. That doesn't mean the issue is of problems and questions people lump together as "the resolved, though. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". 9. rjohnson: (continuation of 2.) No matter how you try to 14. dan: (responding to 9., from 12.) If I'm missing slant the issue, the status of the Sapir-Whorf "hypothesis" something, please let me know, rather than telling me I is still very unclear. (Personally, I don't think it's don't know what I'm talking about. As it happens, I have even a hypothesis; it's a problematic, it's a topos, it's tried to learn about s/w and have considered the issue at an ideological litmus test.) But in any event, though great length. I admit, that in the course of this thread, there may be unanimity on this point in some linguistics I've made some mistakes, but does that qualify me as an departments dominated by Chomskyans, for the rest of us ignorant boob? I don't think so. (and that's most of us) the debate is still alive. (No anti-Chomsky animus expressed or implied.) 15. rjohnson: (responding to 14.) Dan, I thought you You don't know enough about linguistics [either]. didn't take this personally! Of course you're not an Anyway, the question of orthodoxy is beside the point. ignorant boob, not at all. This is not something you vote over. There have been some Still, it would be a lot of fun to handle this this way: suggestive studies on both sides; there has been nothing conclusive, and I see little indication that most of the >I admit, that in the course of this thread, I've made some partisans on both sides have really gotten to terms with mistakes, but does that qualify me as an ignorant boob? what the debate is all about. Sorry - the weak must die. :) 10. dan: (responding to 9.) I'm calling it as I've seen 16. dan: (responding to 9., from 12.) In several cases, it. When I was hyped up on Sapir-Whorf myself a few years I've misunderstood what people were saying, and been ago, I went through any number of texts looking for misunderstood in kind. This happens, but I like to think information on it and came to the conclusion that most that I'm relatively informed about linguistics, based on my linguists that I read seem to disavow it. I guess I read education and my intent to pursue graduate studies in the the wrong books. Even the anti-Chomsky linguists didn't field. seem to have much to say on the matter. ________________________ 11. rjohnson: (responding to 10.) This isn't some kind of [... continuing on the same topic later] insult: you don't know enough about linguistics to say. There are several reasons for this: 17. dan: [SWH] is something I'm rather interested in (as a 1. No one does. The field is too big and too curiosity, I used to be utterly convinced by it too), and heterogeneous, the social networks too fractured, to be I'm actually glad the Lojbanists have dredged it up for able to gauge consensus adequately. serious discussion again. I question their methods though, 2. As you just told us, you're not a trained linguist why not do psychological tests on existing languages, (yet). Pronouncements about what's orthodox are hazardous rather than trying to come up with a whole new one? enough for the most highly trained finger-licker (if you Presumably, if S/W is confirmed by the Lojban project, no follow the imagery); one's words have a way of coming back one would assume that it is only true for Lojban itself. and biting one on the ass here. This goes back to my feeling that Lojban is at best, an 3. "... but I don't know enough about anthropology to intellectual puzzle. If you can learn it and gain some say." But anthropology, and psycholinguistics, and degree of fluency in it, well that's fine for some people. rhetoric, and such areas, are where a lot of the SW work Not for me. goes on nowadays. These people aren't disqualified from contributing simply because they don't hold down lines in 18. dtate: (responding to 17.) Hey, we agree! Weird... the budget of a linguistics department. S/W is about natural languages, of which we have lots. Presumably, if S/W is true, then it is true now, for the languages currently being used. The only problem might be 50 if all current natural languages are sufficiently similar actual hypothesis was; i.e. how to formulate it, the in their world-views that S/W doesn't kick in. If this is racial/political issue, attacks on Whorf's scholarly true, then it would constitute (IMHO) a practical credentials, and the rise of Chomsky's theories which were refutation of S/W, since S/W was originally motivated by orthogonal to S/W and soon attracted all the money). observation of the divergence among current natural The tests were not conclusive, though. One major problem languages. There is theoretical interest in knowing if a is that with natural languages, you can't ever be sure that constructed language like Lojban has a detectable effect on hidden cultural features might obscure the results. There thought patterns, but not nearly as strong as the interest are also more variables to control with natural language in whether there is a difference between (say) Korean and speakers. (This is NOT the same as saying natural Japanese thought patterns, or German vs. French, or Sioux languages are 'too similar'; merely that we don't know how vs. Hopi. to test for the differences.) I'd go even farther, though, and question what it is that How does Lojban improve on this? Being better defined as we hope to learn using Lojban that we couldn't learn better a language than any natural language allows better (and more easily) using natural languages. There's hardly monitoring of actual usage vs. some theoretical norm. any chance of Lojban ever becoming a widespread native Having a structure drastically different from any natural tongue, so any conclusions we get about people whose language should lead to a much larger S/W effect than primary language is Lojban will include the strong bias of between two natural languages. Furthermore, if a S/W self-selection for Lojban proficiency by the subject or effect is found, its nature and manifestation will help ex- some close relative of the subject... perimental design for a new test based on natural languages, when we better understand what we're looking 19. cowan: (responding to 18.) [We hope to learn] the same for. Being culture-free (at least initially) makes it much kinds of things we learn about the mechanics of falling easier to filter out cultural effects. Being different bodies by rolling them down inclined planes rather than from all language families allows better cross-cultural dropping them from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. studies. Because there are several identifiable areas of structural difference, there is a greater likelihood of "JCB's [the founder of Loglan] plan was to attempt to finding effects that may be constrained by the TYPE of build a language tool that would have the major features of structure (S/W may not be general, only specific to certain natural languages, but would have some strong warping in types of structures). its structure that was deviant from all other natural lan- As to Lojban becoming widely spoken, you have to decide guages. This warping would attempt to take normal how wide the goal is. Esperanto managed up to a million structures that presumably set limits on thought, and 'push speakers in 100 years, and the world population and mass them outward in some predictable dimension'. His language media needed for rapid expansion of a language teaching tool would be an extreme case, not a 'typical language' but effort should make Lojban's potential expansion rate 'a severely atypical one', in order to enable any Whorfian significantly higher, if people find a reason to learn it. effects to be more easily seen. He attempted to put Right now the primary such reason is as a linguistic toy, 'decisive but non-essential differences' into the language; as Dan accuses, since there is no obvious financial gain. he still needed the language to be speakable.... Thus we indeed have considerable self-selection in the "The structural extreme he chose was to model the grammar community today. This can easily change: on the well-understood structures of symbolic logic. There are no natural languages based on a predicate grammar, yet - development of computer applications could make learning logicians are skilled at analyzing the structural Lojban a necessity external to personal choice in some relationships between natural language and formal logic.... fields; The essence of these concepts is that 'it forces on its - development of cross-cultural/foreign language education speakers a reasonably small set of assumptions about the applications could lead to more widespread use of Lojban world ... perhaps the smallest possible set'. 'Any at a low level by large segments of population. Some of speaker, from any culture, should find it possible to these will pursue more advanced study of Lojban. express in Loglan what he takes for granted about the world - identifying any preliminary S/W effects that are ... without imposing ... or being able to impose these as- perceived as beneficial will greatly heighten interest in sumptions on his auditor'...." learning the language among potential beneficiaries. - if research using Lojban is funded, some people might (Outer text by Robert LeChevalier, from Ju'i Lobypli #6. actually be paid to learn Lojban as test subjects (and Inner quotations are from James Cooke Brown, Loglan 1, 3rd teach it to their children?). These would presumably be Edition.) chosen to negate self-selection factors, though willingness to accept payment for this sort of thing is 20. lojbab: (responding to 18.) Psychological and other itself a kind of selection (all psychological studies of tests of S/W were performed using natural languages in the volunteers could be questioned on this basis, but such 1950's - at least two large studies, though I don't have studies are standard in the field, so presumably there is references handy. They turned up fairly negative results, capability to filter out such bias in the testing and this is one reason why S/W went into eclipse. (Other methods). factors included an inability to agree even on what the 51 In short, if the language in useful as a tool, it will be - developing tools and techniques for eventual S/W testing; used. As the size and diversity of the community grows, trying to identify what the effects will be and how they self-selection becomes less of a bias factor. can be detected; However, self-selection isn't an irremediable bias. Nor - actually participating in the language community, using is the lack of a large community of speakers. In internal your linguistic skills to help quickly build a set of discussions, some Loglan/ Lojban supporters have argued for initial usage patterns based on the unambiguous language preliminary S/W testing using second-language adults, (and vocabulary, idiom, etc.) that when passed on to notably language inventor J. C. Brown who proposed in his 'native speakers' in the future provides them with a book on the language (Loglan 1, 4th edition) a study where better, more robust, starting point for evolutionary adults of several cultures are all taught Loglan over a change; summer and tested before and after for changes in 'the way - developing techniques of teaching the language as a they think'. (I personally think his design to be flawed second language, when there is no existing idiom. and too simplistic, but if Lojban's S/W effects are truly Related to this is possibly using Lojban's simple dramatic, they could show up in 2nd language fluent structures and culture-free properties to enhance speakers. And such appearance would pretty much guarantee language education. that people would find a way to build a testable 'culture' - preparing other, non-S/W related research based on of 1st language speakers, perhaps by raising children Lojban's features and its availability as a experimental bilingually during the 'critical period', or even from linguistics platform or alternatively as a totally self- birth.) contained 'model' of a language; Incidentally, current thinking in the community is that - using Lojban for other linguistic research that is not as 'logical' thought or expression is not necessarily the dependent on a 'native' base, including studies of aspect most likely to generate noticeable S/W effects. The language learning (1st and 2nd), as a medium for culture- removal of grammatical ambiguity from modification (as free recording of linguistic information in studies of exemplified by the much-discussed plastic cat food lid) other languages (translating to English may help an seems to heighten creative exploration of word combination. English-native reader of your paper get the gist of what This comes from self-observation, and is a linguistic toy a foreign language is saying, but is subject to all the feature, but could lead to profound changes in problem- problems of English cultural usage and ambiguity. There solving in a community speaking Lojban, which ought to are a lot of non-native English readers who may not be qualify as a bona-fide S/W effect. aware of those features. (In short, using Lojban as an Other areas of possible benefit are (surprisingly in a 'international language of linguistics' much as IPA 'logical' language) emotional expression. Lojban has a serves for phonetics). fully developed set of metalinguistic and emotional - and finally, serving as peer reviewers to make sure that attitude indicators that supplant much of the baggage of those of us working directly on the project don't get our aspect and mood found in natural languages, but most heads too far into the clouds. This of course requires clearly separate indicative statements from the emotional that you know something of what we're trying to do, which communication associated with those statements. This might is why we keep bombarding this forum with so many long lead to freer expression and consideration of ideas, since messages :-) stating an idea can be distinguished from supporting that idea. The set of possible indicators is also large enough ________________________ to provide specificity and clarity of emotions that is difficult in natural languages. It is easy to imagine The following are additions to the bibliography of Sapir- enormous changes in communicative activities that involve Whorf Hypothesis materials compiled during the discussions emotions, and corresponding 'world view' changes as a on the computer networks. result. Again, only time will tell. Time is a significant factor here in evaluating Lojban's Here are some references to discussions of the Sapir-Whorf relevance to linguistics today. In the next 10 years, Hypothesis. One is recent; the Fishman article as far as I there will be ONLY 2nd language adults and perhaps a few know has not really been replied to anywhere that I know children raised by non-fluent adults. For at least a of. (The first part of the bibliography is courtesy of generation after that, immediate self-selection will be a Alan Munn, University of Maryland, who made these com- significant potential factor, and Lojban will be at best ments). questionably a 'living language', making its results less than certain. Brown, R. (1957) "Linguistic Determinism and Parts of Still, for linguists TODAY, interest in Lojban can be Speech", Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology 55, 1-5. tied to any of several major channels: - possible use of 2nd language speakers to get preliminary Brown, R. and E. Lenneberg (1958) "Studies in Linguistic ideas on whether S/W is likely; Relativity", in E. Maccoby, T. H. Newcomb & E. L. Hartley - making sure that Lojban's design is as linguistically (eds.), Readings in Social Psychology (3rd ed.), New York: sound as we can make it given current linguistic Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 9-18. knowledge, ensuring that eventual S/W results are meaningful; 52 In the same volume, "The Function of Language and it has a phonetic writing system. In studies done with Classification in Behavior", by John B. Carroll and Joseph English school children it was demonstrated that one year B. Casagrande, pp. 18-31. of instruction in Esperanto gave the students the same level of language competence as five years of studying Fishman, J. (1960) "A Systematization of the Whorfian French. Once you learn to conjugate one verb, you know how Hypothesis", Behavioral Science 5, pp. 232-239. to conjugate them all! Hoijer, H. (1954) Language in Culture (Comparative Studies 2. daj: (responding to 1.) I agree 100% that an artificial of Cultures and Civilizations, No. 3; Memoirs of the language is easier to learn as a second language, and as a American Anthropological Association, No. 79), Chicago: medium of international communication, something like University of Chicago Press. Esperanto may make more sense than English. In fact, after teaching English as a foreign language for a couple of Kay, P. and W. Kempton (1984) "What is the Sapir-Whorf years, I came to the conclusion that it would make much Hypothesis?", American Anthropologist pp. 86, 65-79. more sense to teach Pidgin English than real English. But when pidgins become the primary language of a Whorf, B.L. (1939) "The relation of habitual thought and community, they cease to be regular and simple. Why? Is behavior to language", in B.L. Whorf (1956) The Selected creolization a degenerative process, or do the Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. irregularities have a function in language? I think we need an answer to this question before we assume that we These articles are both for and against SWH; The Brown can construct a "logical" language and use it as a real papers and the Kay/Kempton paper are attempts to test the medium of communication. hypothesis. The Fishman article discusses the results of some experiments and where they leave us with respect to 3. lojbab: (responding to 2.) On the other hand, why not various versions of SW. invent a completely regular language, with a 'cultural ethic' that values that regularity, and observe what if any Other Sapir-Whorf references: irregularities come into existence. Alford, Danny K. 1978. "The Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis 4. dtate: (responding to 3.) Because you can't create a (A Major Revision in the History of Linguistics)", 'cultural ethic' by fiat. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley 5. lojbab: (continuation of 3.) Lojban is not limited in Linguistic Society 4:485-99. linguistic research application to testing Sapir-Whorf; I've given a lot of my own effort to ensuring that the Hymes, Dell, 1968. "Two Types of Linguistic Relativity", in design is robust enough to allow other studies. Pidgins Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics and creoles of the world have all evolved from interaction Conference (1964). Ed. by W. Bright. Janua Linguarum between two or more already irregular and highly complex Series Major, 20. Mouton: The Hague. pp. 114-167. languages. Variables to watch in analyzing the evolution of the language are too many and too poorly understood. Lucy, John, 1985. "Whorf's View of the Linguistic Mediation Lojban is both much simpler and highly regular. Presumably of Thought", in E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier, Semiotic as a result, the variables affecting pidginization and Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychosocial Perspectives, creolization, and indeed all other manner of linguistic Orlando: Academic Press. change will stand out much better. Furthermore, as a fledgling 'international language' that McNeill, David, 1987. "Linguistic Determinism: The differs structurally from all of the 'first languages' of Whorfian Hypothesis", Chapter 6 of Psycholinguistics, A New the world, the studies of evolutionary processes can be Approach, New York: Harper and Row. pp. 173-209. conducted over and again as Lojban interacts with each of the languages and cultures in which it is introduced. ________________________ Other areas of possible Lojban application include Subject: Esperanto and Lojban language universals (Lojban is relatively neutral on some of these, supporting many competing forms; the ones that Participants: survive or spread as the language becomes a 'living' [email protected] (Neal D. McBurnett) language' are thus worth studying to find out why.) and [email protected] (John Cowan) universal grammar (if Lojban proves to be acquired by chil- [email protected] (David A. Johns) dren and adults as easily as natural languages, UG will [email protected] (Eric Pepke) have to be able to explain it). [email protected] (Loren Petrich) Note that a small number of Lojban speakers (especially [email protected] (David M Tate) in a specific speaking locale) would be expected to show [email protected] (Bob LeChevalier) evolutionary effects more quickly, enhancing the chances of observing such effects during a short research period. 1. neal: Esperanto is much easier to learn than English or We've set an early prescriptive policy towards the language any other ethnic language because it has few irregularities precisely to allow enough of a fluent speaker base to form 53 to preserve some type of linguistic identity to serve as a ________________________ starting point. 8. loren: (later in the discussion) I wonder how Lojban handles (1) words for opposites and (2) verb aspects (if 6. pepke: (responding to 2.) "Degenerative" is kind of a present). loaded term. It may just be the point of view. If you start off with an artificially "perfect" language, just 9. cowan: (responding to 8.) The term "opposite" is a bit about any change will seem degenerative. vague. Among its 1300+ root words, some have "opposites" and some don't. There are words for both "increase" and 7. lojbab: (responding to 6.) Not in the case of Lojban. "decrease"; "beautiful" is a root but "ugly" is not. Since ONLY a change that introduces structural ambiguity is the root words are primarily chosen for ease-of-use in automatically 'frowned upon', and I personally doubt there making compounds, this was justified primarily by the is a major evolutionary force in language that promotes desire to make shorter compounds. such ambiguity 'for it's own sake' - there would have to be There is a faction which has argued that there are too some other explanation for an ambiguity to be introduced. many root words (and that opposites in particular should be Most other types of changes (word formation rules, stripped out); another faction holds that there are too few phonological changes, preference in word order among them) (that choosing "beautiful" rather than "ugly" is an would not be inherently degenerative. No one in the Lojban unwanted bias). In fact, having a list of root words at community thinks that we've created a 'perfect' language, all is ipso facto a bias, but it is a known bias which can only an 'adequate' one for communication and linguistic be allowed for. The alternative is having to construct 4-5 research. million distinct words with no compounding rules at all to cover the vocabulary range of the world's languages. The general Lojban solution lies in the four particles "na'e", "to'e", "no'e", and "je'a", which are four kinds of scalar negation. This is distinct from contradictory negation ("It is not the case that...") which is represented in Lojban by "na" and "naku". "na'e" is nonspecific scalar negation, analogous to English "non-". "lo na'e gerku" means "a non-dog", which in principle could be anything that is not a dog, but probably means some other kind of animal. "to'e" is polar opposite scalar negation, analogous to some uses of English "un-"/"in-". "Beautiful" is "melbi", and "ugly" is "to'e melbi". "barda" ("large") means the same as "to'e cmalu" ("unsmall"), and vice versa. "no'e" is scalar neutral negation. This arises when a scale whose opposing ends are "X" and "to'e X" has a natural midpoint. "no'e melbi" for example might be translated "plain" or "ordinary-looking". "je'a" is affirmation, and has the same meaning as no particle at all. It is chiefly useful to deny one of the other particles in conversation [ed. note, also for emphatic affirmation]. (Lojban also has another type of negation called metalinguistic negation, where the adequacy of the utterance is denied due to category mistake or what have you. The particle "na'i" indicates that what precedes it (or the whole last utterance, if nothing precedes in this utterance) is erroneous in some such way. If a Lojbanist asks another: xu do sisti le zu'o do rapdarxi le do fetspe literally: (True or false?) You cease the activity of repeat-hitting your female-spouse? or idiomatically: Have you stopped beating your wife? 54 a good and sufficient answer is "na'i".) to any predicate whatsoever by using the particle "fi'o" The above sentence could be expressed with the aspect which makes a predicate into an aspectual. grammar rather than with the word "sisti" (cease), but I don't know the language well enough to do so yet. ________________________ The tense/aspect system of Lojban is one of the most Subject: Lojban gismu Vocabulary complex parts of the grammar, and I am far from sure that I understand it altogether. Fortunately, it is 100% Participants: optional. Everything it can express can also be expressed [email protected] (Ivan Derzhanski semantically through the predicate grammar, or just omitted [email protected] (Bob LeChevalier) altogether. Rather than trying to explain the whole thing 1. lojbab: [part of a longer discussion on Lojban roots] systematically, I will simply give an unsystematic We wanted to maximize ease of learning, BUT not at the catalogue of the kinds of things that can be expressed. expense of cultural neutrality. Loglan (generic) thus Note: any of these items may be combined either by logical maximizes reflecting the sequences of phonemes in a given connectives (and, or, xor, etc.) or by non-logical ones word from the corresponding words in the source languages, (joined with, mixed with, union, intersection, etc.) weighted by speaker population. Thus 'blanu' has the It is also worth mentioning that Lojban tense is "sticky" phonemes in order of English 'blue' and Chinese 'lan' (with and that once set it propagates to all following untensed appropriate tone which I don't have handy). The result is sentences [ed. note: This is the default pragmatic intended to be words that are distinctly different from interpretation for many contexts; however there may be those of any one language, but which sound 'natural' to contextual circumstances where tense does not carry over, speakers of the source languages and also have an indirect such as:] In stories, this is modified a bit by the cognate value - not one that is necessarily obvious, but assumption that narrative flows in time, so each sentence one that can be used to learn the word if it is pointed may represent a time later than that of the preceding one. out. One may, however, by proper use of the time offset machinery, tell stories backwards or inside-out as desired. 2. ivan: (responding to 1.) If it is pointed out indeed. I First, Lojban tense handles both time relations and space speak Russian, English, Spanish and Hindi, and I know some relations, where time may be treated either as sui generis Arabic, but my attempts to analyze some Lojban words and to or in an Einsteinian way as the fourth spatial dimension. discover their roots failed almost totally. Time and space are formally parallel: for each, there is a way of specifying an origin, one or more offsets from the 3. lojbab: (responding to 2.) At first contact, you WILL origin (directions in time or space), and an interval need to have the connection pointed out. But I suspect around the point thus determined. In the case of space that after the connections are pointed out for a few words, only, the interval may be specified as 1-, 2-, 3- or 4- someone with your language experience will begin to see the dimensional. In addition, there is machinery for rep- patterns. One problem, of course, is that we go for aural resenting motions in space, but not in time. Should time recognition, NOT visual recognition, and use Lojbanized travel become practicable, the 4-dimensional facilities of phonetics. The Procrustean bed of Lojban morphology (all the space motion grammar may become useful. roots are of the pattern CCVCV or CVCCV) also constrains Intervals may also be modified by either or both of two the result enormously. The algorithm we use attempts, kinds of modifiers. One type is a quantified tense, which within the framework of this morphology, to maximize aural may be either objective (corresponding to English "never", recognition for an active student of the language. "once", "twice", ..., "always" for time, or "nowhere", "in one place", ..., "everywhere" for space) or subjective 4. lojbab: (continuation of 1.) Incidentally, once you get (things like "habitually" and "continuously"). The other used to them, the regularities in Lojban words have their type is an "event contour", handling things like "during", own aesthetic value, just as Nick's portmanteau words from "after the (natural) end of", "after the termination of", Esperanto do. Lojban words have a lot of medial 'n' and etc. 'r' and initial fricatives 'j', 'c', and 's', all derived There is also a mechanism for specifying the from the heavy Chinese weighting. I have a little trouble actuality/potentiality status of a predication: things like with the fricatives unless I'm relaxed - I get 'she sells "can and has", "can but has not", etc. sea shells' type tongue twisters, but I presume the Chinese Separate from all this, Lojban prepositions (really case will find it pleasant. tags) can be used as adverbials also, and are grammatically almost interchangeable with the tenses. Likewise, the 5. ivan: (responding to 4.) No offence intended, but I'd tenses can be used prepositionally. "pu" represents the like to hear the Chinese confirm this. For all you know, past tense (time direction in the past), but means "earlier they may not. Schleyer went out of his way to put as few than" as a preposition. "bai" on the other hand is the "r"s as possible in VolapЃk words, so that the Chinese will preposition "under the compulsion of" but means "forcedly" be happy. I hope at least his Chinese find it easy to say when used as an aspectual. This list of "obs" `we' or "coecs" `government officials' (i.e. prepositions/adverbials/ aspectuals/case tags is extensible `judges'), because I don't. :-) 55 6. lojbab: (responding to 5.) That of course is the problem with any a priori word-making scheme. Especially without The range of consonant clusters we permit in Lojban was strong aid from native speakers. We have had one Chinese augmented after a Slavic languages expert pointed out that speaker look at this question directly, but since she is our set was extremely tame and excessively constraining on also fluent in German and English, she isn't necessarily an the words and their recognition. Lojban root words can be unbiased observer. The reason for the high sibilant recognized as roots by the presence of the consonant frequencies though, is that several Chinese consonants map cluster - which is never found in structure words and al- into Lojban 'c', 's', and 'j'. ways found in predicate words. We thus constrained the set of clusters in medial position by disallowing Still, there is a balancing act. Chinese is favored by the voiced/unvoiced mixing of stops and fricatives, doubled weighting scheme, but as you point out, we have 'r' and 'l' consonants, and most mixed sibilants. Permitted initial as phonemes which are much more common in other languages. clusters are a subset of these (48), which are phonetically Still, a high percentage of Lojban roots have syllable symmetric (thus, because we allow the unvoiced 'st', we ending '-an' making 'n' such a common letter in the allow the voiced equivalent 'zd', even though it isn't language, its frequency exceeds most vowels (in a language found in English. more vowel rich than English because of all the CV and CVV structure words). Languages require a certain amount of redundancy to be understandable. My own comparative examination seems to We had to make guesses on how to achieve recognizability in indicate that most languages have either consonant clusters other languages, (and were also constrained to be or tones, and that having one seems to minimize the consistent with 30 years of prior work by language inventor evolutionary pressure towards the other. Polynesian and Brown). Ideally, there would have been scientific testing Japanese are the only exceptions to this I know of (and of our algorithm in native speakers of each language before Japanese actually has some clusters, though they aren't making the words, but this wasn't possible and indeed reflected in the writing system). Can anybody confirm or wasn't important enough. deny my observation? What other techniques are found in languages that improve redundancy. The important thing was to have a neutral word-making method that did not favor any one language population, and 12. lojbab: (continuation of 1., from 7. and 9.) So we end paid at least lip service to recognizing language up with a language that has some aesthetic appeal for diversity. We also wanted non-random words, with phonemes everyone, but perhaps doesn't satisfy everyone; a pleasant occurring in orders that are speakable and familiar, and we cultural tension/ balance. got this. 13. ivan: (responding to 12.) And again, don't stress too 7. lojbab: (continuation of 1., from 4.) Some of the much on the aesthetic side. It is too subjective. It is up initial consonant clusters look intimidating, but Ivan to the person. Let's talk efficiency and ease. won't mind them. 14. lojbab: (responding to 13.) Aesthetics is enormously 8. ivan: (responding to 7.) I certainly don't. I don't important, even though subjective. It determines people's take them all for granted, but they are not intimidating in first reactions to the language. Efficiency can be any case. quantified, and is more objective, as you say. But languages need some minimum redundancy and I suspect that 9. lojbab: (continuation of 7.) (and might prefer them) we don't know what that minimum is. So pushing too hard in this direction might give a language that is too efficient 10. ivan: (responding to 9.) ... prefer them to what? Not to be practical (Anyone for Speedtalk - Heinlein's language to simple consonant-vowel alternation, no. I wouldn't miss in 'Gulf'). the clusters if they weren't there. But they are, and I won't complain. 15. lojbab: (continuation of 1.) Thus spaghetti becomes 'djarspageti', with the 'dja' from 'cidja', the word for 11. lojbab: (responding to 10.) One of the most frequent 'food'. comments about Lojban words is that the consonant clusters look hard to English speakers, and this was more an answer 16. ivan: (responding to 15.) "ci" is the Chinese _shi4_, I to this criticism than a claim about the aesthetics of presume. What is "dja"? Slavic language speakers. Still, it seems a reasonable presumption that most people feel more comfortable with a 17. lojbab: (responding to 16.) Ivan Derzhanski asked about language that sounds a little like their own. the Lojban etymologies, and gave 'cidja' as an example Interestingly, our phonology has a result that several word. It is halfway down this list. people with experience with a variety of languages have said that Lojban (as I speak it) sounds like a south Slavic The following are rough etymologies of a sampling of Lojban language. It will be interesting at some point to have a words. These are being assembled for eventual publication southern Slavic speaker confirm this. 56 as a set, but we have to manually reconstruct what the I'll schematically outline the information for the first computer-run algorithm did for each word. word: It is key to remember that we often ran several words from 714c katna 82.00 cut a single language against words from other languages in order to select the word with the highest score. In some [Algo [Lojban [score [English cases, this means that the word from a language that 'won' run #] word] (0-100)] keyword] is not the best word for the concept in the language. Instead, subject to a little educated guesswork, we have [This line is from a summary file of algorithm outputs, words that offer a reasonable cognate-like memory hook prepared manually at the time we made the words.] between the Lojban word and a related source-language word. A second note, is that words are Lojbanized phonetically. kan kat kat kort kas kata This can result in some strange-looking spellings; e.g. English and Russian vowels and final consonants often [Lojbanized phonetic forms of the source language words - change. the order of words is Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic. We have not yet manually gone back to our paper originals to get the Romanized natural language spellings. Note: some declensional word endings were systematically removed to get a true root. This was to avoid getting a false recognition score solely from the declension. The stop component of affricates were removed for the same reason. There were a few other systematic a priori modifications to the source language words that I can respond to if anyone has questions about a word. Note that the source word may not be the best word for the concept in the language. We aren't expert in all these languages, and in any case wanted to have a memory hook for the word more than a cognate. (cut ) [English keyword from the algorithm output file] katna 82.00 3 3 3 0 2 4 [Lojban word and score from the output file - there were occasional typos in making the manual summary, which we are only now finding (about 3-4% error rate - we were working quickly and didn't check ourselves well). The 6 digits are scores for the 6 source words, in order. The numbers represent phoneme matches, in order - a score of 1 was considered useless for recognition, and a score of 2 required the phonemes to be adjacent or separated by exactly one phoneme in BOTH source and Lojban. Thus 'kort' from Spanish gets a 0 score even though it has some cognate value.] 714c katna 82.00 cut kan kat kat kort kas kata (cut ) katna 82.00 3 3 3 0 2 4 57 714c klaku 60.90 weep (cry) 714e fetsi 62.14 female/fem- ku krai vilap ior plak baka si fem stri feminin jiensk uncau (weep ) (female ) klaku 60.90 2 2 2 0 3 2 fetsi 62.14 2 2 2 3 2 0 714c krixa 61.30 cry out 714e spoja 57.51 explode xan krai cila grit kric sarax ja iksplod vispot eksplo vzriv fajar (cry out ) (explode ) krixa 61.30 2 3 2 2 3 2 spoja 57.51 2 3 3 3 0 2 714c kulnu 45.20 culture 714f catlu 45.05 look uen kalcr sabiat kultur kultur takaf ciau luk dek mir smatr tatala uen kalcr sanskrit kultur kultur takaf ciau luk dek ve smatr tatala uen kalcr sabiat kultur kultur tarbut (look at ) uen kalcr sanskrit kultur kultur tarbut catlu 45.05 3 2 0 0 2 3 (culture ) kulnu 45.20 2 2 0 4 4 0 714f grake 80.70 gram ke gram gram gram gram giram 714c mitre 89.40 meter (gram ) mi mitr mitar metr mietr mitr grake 80.70 2 3 3 3 3 3 (meter ) mitre 89.40 2 4 4 3 4 4 714f krefu 57.53 recur 3/3o lower score no conflict affix 714c sanmi 62.90 meal [the 3rd best word was taken to give the word a short san mil bojan sen eda taam affix] (meal ) fu rikr pir rekur pere takrar sanmi 62.90 3 2 2 2 0 2 (recur ) krefu 57.53 2 2 0 3 2 2 714c sefta 60.00 surface/face 2/2o lower score no conflict [the highest score word 714f lijda 42.72 religion (relig-) was used] jiau rilij darm relixio religi din se srfis satax kostad pavierxnast satxa (religious ) (surface ) lijda 42.72 2 3 2 2 2 0 sefta 60.00 2 2 3 3 0 3 714f mlana 54.29 side/lateral 714d bersa 57.00 son 4/4o lower score no conflict affix er san beta ix sin ibn mian latrl satax lad starana janib er san beta ix sin najl mian latrl bagal lad starana janib (son ) (side ) bersa 57.00 2 2 3 0 0 0 mlana 54.29 3 2 2 2 3 2 714d pruxi 53.00 spirit 714f rinju 49.08 restrain guei spirit pret espiritu dux rux ju ristrein pratiband refren abuzdiv kabax (spirit ) ju ristrein pratiband refren sdierjiv kabax pruxi 53.00 2 3 2 3 2 3 (restrain ) rinju 49.08 2 3 3 2 0 0 714d suksa 61.20 sudden su sadn saxsa subit vdruk faja su sadn saxsa subit vdruk bagta (sudden ) suksa 61.20 2 2 3 2 2 0 714e cidja 61.45 food/feed ci fid bojan komid pic gida (food ) cidja 61.45 2 2 2 2 0 3 58 ________________________ Part VI: Grammar Subject: Interlinguistics and Lojban Vocabulary Building Probal Dasgupta: Degree words in Esperanto and categories in Universal Grammar Participants: Klaus Schubert: An unplanned development in planned [email protected] (Jeff Prothero) languages. [email protected] (Bob LeChevalier) [email protected] (Mike Urban) Part VII: Terminology and Computational Lexicography Wera Blanke: Terminological standardization - its roots Jeff Prothero: and fruits in planned languages Rudiger Eichholz: Terminics in the interethnic language I've been poking through the Linguistics section of the Victor Sadler: Knowledge-driven terminography for machine campus library, and found a book which might interest other translation Loglanists: ----------------------------- Trends in Linguistics - Studies and Monographs 42: I'm not a linguist, and won't attempt to review the book Interlinguistics Aspects of the Science of Planned from a linguistics point of view, but I will highlight some Languages, Klaus Schubert (Ed.), Mouton de Gruyter 1989, points of particular interest to Loglanists: ISBN 3-11-011910-2, 350 pg., $66. First, there is some mention of Loglan (and the thousand- odd other artificial language projects to date), but the "This book ... is an invitation to all those interested bulk of the focus is on Esperanto, for the simple reason in languages and linguistics to make themselves acquainted that 99.9% of fluent planned-language users speak with some recent streams of scientific discussion in the Esperanto, and a similar percentage of the written-text field of planned languages." corpus from the planned language community is in Esperanto. The book is a collection of fifteen recent papers in (Any Loglanists who cannot tolerate mention of That interlinguistics. For folks who (like me) haven't been Language are invited to stop reading at this point. :-) following the field, the bibliographies provide an up-to- Second, I (and perhaps most Loglanists) was unaware of date set of pointers into the literature, plus some the Distributed Language Translation project, which seems overviews of it. I think the table of contents gives an to be of considerable potential interest to Loglanists. adequate idea of the scope and focus of the book: The following is quoted for comment: ----------------------------------------- "Distributed Language Translation is the name of a long- Part I: Introductions term research and development project carried out by the Andre Martinet: The proof of the pudding BSO software house in Utrecht with funding from the Klaus Schubert: Interlinguistics - its aims, its Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs. For the present achievements, and its place in language science. seven year period (1985-1991) it has a budget of 17 million guilders... Although much larger in size than earlier Part II: Planned Languages in Linguistics attempts, DLT started off as just another project of the Aleksandr D Dulicenko: Ethnic language and planned second stage, using Esperanto as its intermediate language. language. Esperanto had been judged suitable for this purpose because Detlev Blanke: Planned languages - a survey of some of the of its highly regular syntax and morphology and because its main problems. agglutinative nature promised an especially efficient Sergej N Kuznecov: Interlinguistics: a branch of applied possibility of morpheme-based coding of messages for linguistics? network transmission. During the course of the first years of the large-scale practical development, however, the role Part III: Languages Design and Language Change of Esperanto in the DLT system increased substantially. the Dan Maxwell: Principles for constructing Planned Languages intermediate language took over more and more processes Francois Lo Jacomo: Optimization in language planning originally designed to be carried out either in the source Claude Piron: A few notes on the evolution of Esperanto or in the target languages of the multilingual system. When I consider the DLT system to be one step more highly Part IV: Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics developed than the earlier implementations involving Jonathan Pool - Bernard Grofman: Linguistic artificiality Esperanto, it is because the increase in the role of and cognitive competence Esperanto was due to intrinsic qualities of Esperanto as a Claude Piron: Who are the speakers of Esperanto planned language. In other words, Esperanto is in DLT no Tazio Carlevaro: Planned auxiliary language and longer treated as any other language (which incidentally communicative competence. has a somewhat more computer-friendly grammar than other languages), but it is now used in DLT for a large part of Part V: The Language of Literature the overall translation process because of its special Manuel Halvelik: Planning nonstandard language features as a planned language. Some facets of this Pierre Janton: If Shakespeare had written in Esperanto complex application are discussed by Sadler [in this volume]. 59 "The functions fulfilled in DLT by means of Esperanto are none), there seems no reason to idly re-invent a wheel of numerous. Generally speaking one can say that since the this magnitude. This ain't a DOD project, folks :-) There insight about the usefulness of a planned language's will be language bigots on both sides opposed in principle particular features for natural-language processing, the to any cooperation, of course... whole DLT system design has tended to move into the Esper- Less obviously, Loglan may be able to benefit from the anto part of the system all functions that are not specific design knowledge gained from a century's experience with, for particular source or target languages. These are all and linguistic study of, the Esperanto affix system. Klaus semantic and pragmatic processes of meaning disambiguation, Schubert's paper "An unplanned development in planned word choice, detection of semantic deixis and reference languages: A study of word grammar" is suggestive. relations, etc. So-called knowledge of the world has been Zamenhof, like Jim Brown, paid no particular attention to stored in a lexical knowledge bank and is consulted by a word formation in his original design, simply providing a word expert system. All these applications of Artificial uniform stock of primitives which could be concatenated at Intelligence are in DLT carried out entirely in Esperanto. will to create new words. Let it be said explicitly: Esperanto does not serve as a Despite this lack of conscious planning, linguistic study programming language (DLT is implemented in Prolog and C), of word formation in Esperanto (started by Rene de Saussure but as a human language which renders the full content of - not to be confused with Ferdinand Saussure - and the source text being translated with all its nuances, continued by Sergej Kuznecov and others), this simple disambiguates it and conveys it to the second translation syntactic combination rule has supported the development of step to a target language." a systematic set of semantic combination rules. These (unwritten and unconscious but nevertheless universal) Obviously, the existence of significant amounts of fully semantic combination rules allow the Esperantist, when disambiguated, machine-processable Esperanto text in such a faced with an unfamiliar compound word, to not only translation system opens up the possibility of wholesale decompose it into (usually) familiar primitives, but also mechanical translation into Loglan. This would be, obvi- to somewhat systematically deduce the meaning of the word. ously, particularly easy if the (currently poorly-defined) Recent decades have apparently seen increasingly free use semantics of the Loglan affix system were brought into line of these facilities. with the existing semantics of the Esperanto affix system. I won't attempt a summary of these semantic rules here, In this case, bi-directional mechanical translation between but will try to give the flavor. Even though the primitive the two languages might become quite easy, possible stock syntactically forms a single neutral pool, it appears producing sort of an "instant literature" for the that prims [gismu] are semantically treated in word Loglanist. combination by Esperantists as being divided into noun, Building a simple correspondence between Esperanto and verb and modifier (combined adverb/adjective) classes, Loglan affixes is not as far-fetched an idea as it might which combine with distinctively different rules. This first seem. Esperanto, like Loglan, uses a single root- distinction provides one dimension for sorting prims. stock of affixes which may be arbitrarily concatenated to A second, orthogonal dimension sorts prims into the form compound words. Where Loglan assigns two forms to categories independent morpheme, declension morpheme, (most) concepts, a pred and an affix, Esperanto uniformly ending (these first three correspond roughly to Loglan's assigns only a single affix (cutting the learning load in "little words"), affixoid, affix and root (these final half!), but this poses no particular intertranslation three correspond to the Loglan affix set). These affix problem. Loglan affixes are designed to be uniquely types combine according to a word-compounding grammar which resolvable, and Esperanto affixes are not, but this problem allows the listener to distinguish (among other things) has evidently already been solved, hence again poses no those compounds whose meaning is directly deducible from particular problem to bi-directional translation. Again, the meaning of the component prims, from those compounds Loglan has a (putatively) unambiguous grammar which whose meaning is metaphorical and must be learned. Esperanto lacks, but this problem has apparently already If Loglan were to borrow the Esperanto compound been satisfactorily resolved at the Esperanto end. vocabulary wholesale, it would of course, willy nilly, inherit these semantic regularities as well. Otherwise, it ---------------------------------------- might be well to study these regularities and consciously incorporate them in the Loglan vocabulary. Elsewhere on the affix front, Loglan has a set of affixes, but has barely begun the enormous task of building ------------------------------------- the compound-word vocabulary. Loglan could learn from Esperanto on (at least) two levels. lojbab responds: Most obviously, bringing the Loglan affix system into 1. Of the authors, Detlev Blanke is on our mailing list, semantic correspondence with the Esperanto affix system but probably too recently to have based anything he wrote would open the door to wholesale borrowing of Esperanto on our material. compound metaphors, capitalizing on the planned language 2. Jeff's quoted description of the Netherlands community's multi-mega-man-year investment. Unless there translation project is useful; we were certainly aware of are sound engineering concerns to the contrary (I see it. 60 3. The Netherlands project is based on Esperanto - but examples) from old Loglan to Lojban by this need to with a caveat. It uses a formalized 'written' Esperanto retranslate all the compounds (which he used extensively form that may be slightly different from spoken forms, but and in ways inconsistent with our current, better defined most importantly has disambiguating information encoded in semantics). the way the language is written. For example grouping of b) as mentioned above, our affixes are not in 1-to-1 modifiers (our 'pretty little girls school' problem) is correspondence. solved by using extra SPACES to disambiguate which terms c) their compounds undoubtedly have a strong European modify which. bias. I doubt if it is as bad as Jim Brown's (who built 4. Esperanto's affix system is similarly ambiguous, the compound for 'to man a ship' from the metaphor 'man- though not as bad as 1975 Loglan was. I've been given a do'; i.e. 'to do as a man to'. He also did 'kill' as few examples. Some handy ones are 'romano' which is either 'dead-make' where 'make' is the concept 'to make ... from a 'novel' (root + no affix) or 'Roman' (root 'Romo' = Rome materials ...' Sounds more like Frankenstein to me, plus affix -an-) and 'banano' which is either 'banana' or folks.) But I suspect Esperanto has a few zinger's in 'bather' (from 'bano' = bath + -an- again). I've been told there. Indeed, I understand the Ido people criticized there are many others. This type of ambiguity presents no Esperanto most significantly for its illogical word problem to a machine translator, which can store hyphens to building, though I don't have details. I also intend to separate affixes etc. draw heavily from Chinese, which has a more Lojbanic tanru 5. I have not investigated Esperanto's affix system 'metaphor' system since it doesn't distinguish between thoroughly, but it is not compatible with Lojban's. (We nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Esperanto tries to get did ensure at one point that we had gismu, and therefore around this by allowing relatively free conversion between rafsi corresponding to each of the Esperanto affixes, these categories, but the root concepts are taken from though.) Simply put, Lojban has rafsi for EACH of its European languages that more rigidly categorize words, and gismu. Esperanto has only a couple of dozen, and a MUCH their compounds probably reflect European semantics. larger root set. Some Esperanto affixes have several d) Most importantly, Esperanto words are not gismu. They Lojban equivalents. For example, we now have "na'e", do not have place structures. Lojban words do, and the "no'e" and "to'e" for scalar negation of various sorts to affix semantics and compound semantics must be consistent correspond to Esperanto's "mal-". Note that Jeff did not with those place structures. We've covered this in mention the large root set in his comments. Most of these previous discussions in the guise of warning against roots are combined by concatenation, like German. But 'figurative' metaphors that are inconsistent with the place apparently as often as not a new root is coined rather than structures. concatenate, since Esperanto has no stigma attached to e) Nope. Most importantly is another reason. Lojban is borrowing. But it is not true that Lojban has two forms its own language. It should not be an encoded Esperanto while Esperanto only has one. any more then it should be an encoded English. I suspect 6. The Esperanto affix/semantic system is probably even that just like English words, Esperanto words sometimes more poorly defined than Lojban's. As Jeff said, it is have diverse multiple context-dependent meanings (though largely intuitive; this means independent of a rule system. again perhaps less severely than English). We want to However, there are rules; this was mentioned a few times in minimize this occurrence in Lojban if not prevent it (we the recent JL debates between Don Harlow, Athelstan and may not succeed, but we can try - the rule that every word myself. A guy named Kalocsay apparently wrote up the rules created must have a place structure is a good start.) early in this century; they are some 40-50 pages long and The bottom line is that each Esperanto word must be most Esperantists never read them much less learn them. checked for validity, just like any other lujvo proposal, They also are apparently rather freely violated in actual but must also be translated into its closest equivalent usage; they were descriptive of the known language, not Lojban tanru as well, and have a place structure written, prescriptive. By the way, I suspect that Lojban's etc. The bulk of dictionary writing is this other work. I compounding semantics is actually better-defined than it can and have made new tanru/lujvo (without working out the seems. I just don't know enough about semantic theory to place structures) at the rate of several per MINUTE for attempt to write it up. Jim Carter wrote a paper several related concepts. Coranth D'Gryphon posted a couple years ago, which we can probably offer for distribution (or hundred proposals last December (that no one commented on), he can), on the semantics of compound place structures. We which he made based on English definitions. We have haven't adopted what he has said whole-hog, but it perhaps 200 PAGES of word proposals to go through. Nearly certainly has been influential. all of these have no place structures defined or are 7. We will probably make extensive use of Esperanto defined haphazardly. dictionaries when we start our buildup of the Lojban lujvo Lojban also has a multi-man-year investment behind it, vocabulary. We thus will not reinvent the wheel in though not 'mega'. No, Jeff, we aren't a DOD project, but totality. BUT, we cannot do this freely for a large number in terms of people working on it and time spent, we've far of reasons. exceeded many such projects. And word-building, whether a) our root set is different than theirs. Some of their for better or worse, has received the greatest portion of compounds will thus not work. The same is true of old that effort, since that is all most people have felt Loglan words. We've been held up on translating Jim competent to work on. (Incidentally, the Netherlands Carter's Akira story (the one he uses in all his guaspi project IS a government sponsored project, if not defense- 61 related. If we had several million dollars, I think we'd example, a suffix that would transform a noun root be well along the way to a translator ourselves. Sheldon `martelo' to a root meaning `to hammer') with rather subtle Linker has claimed that he could do a Lojban conversing shades of distinction in some cases. The result is a program with heuristic 'understanding' a la HAL 9000 in 5 language that is only slightly more logical than Esperanto, man-years. This is, in my mind, of comparable difficulty but proportionally harder to learn, and no less to a heuristic translation program. Any comments out there Eurocentric. from those who know more than I do on this subject? Linguistic tinkerers like the Idists underestimated the organic quality of Esperanto, or of any living language. ----------------------------------------- Indeed, one of the valuable aspect of Lojban or Loglan, if either ever develops a substantial population of fluent Mike Urban: speakers, will be to observe the extent to which the common usages of the language diverge from the prescriptive While I am a dyed-in-the-wool Esperantist, I agree that definitions. Such effects will, I think, be easier to attempting to modify or extend Lojban in imitation of isolate and analyze in a language that was created `from various features of Esperanto would be a mistake (I also whole cloth' than in an a posteriori language like lose patience with reformers who want to Lojbanify aspects Esperanto. of Esperanto). Esperanto's `affix system is ambiguous' to the extent that the language itself is indeed lexically ambiguous. Proposed Lojban Machine Grammar Baseline Changes Not only `affixes' but roots themselves are combinable, and by John Cowan so it is possible to come up with endless puns like the `banano' ones you mentioned (`literaturo' might be a tower This document explains the technical corrections to the of letters, i.e., a `litera turo'). Without the careful, tentative baseline grammar of 20 July as proposed by John but somewhat restrictive, phonological rules that Loglan or Cowan. Each change is explained in a three-part format: Lojban provides, this kind of collision is inevitable. CURRENT LANGUAGE; PROPOSED CHANGE; RATIONALE. Those The borrowing of words in Esperanto (`neologisms') wishing an exact list of changes to the grammar baseline instead of using a compound form is a controversial topic. rules should contact us. The changes are sufficiently Claude Piron, in his recent book, La Bona Lingvo, argues minor that we do not plan to reissue the machine grammar (quite convincingly, I think) that the tendency of some Es- before the final baseline, although we are considering an perantists to use neologisms, usually from French, English, addendum with the exact list of changes after they are or Greek, is partly based on pedanticism, partly based on formally approved, which will go to those at level 2 and Eurocentrism (``you mean, everyone doesn't know what above. `monotona' means?''), partly a Francophone desire to have a separate word for everything, and largely a failure to Executive Summary: really Think IN Esperanto, rather than translating. In any 1 JOIK connection between operands case, the distinction in Esperanto between affixes and root 2 Multiple EK_KEs between operands words has always been a thin one (Zamenhof mentioned that 3 Reorder BIhI GAhO GAhO to GAhO BIhI GAhO you can do anything with an affix that you can do with a 4 Remove GAhOs in parentheses root), and has been getting even thinner in recent years. 5 NA SE without NAI in afterthought connectives Combining by concatenation is every bit as intrinsic to the 6 Negation/conversion of BIhI language as the use of suffixes. 7 KI by itself and after BAI You asked about Ido and Esperanto. While I have not 8 *ANNULLED* looked at Ido in a number of years, I recall that the main 9 GIhEK_KE priority change gripe of the Idists was not that Esperanto was too European 10 No FAhO before TUhU - indeed, one of their reforms was to discard Esperanto's 11 Attach free modifierss to tense_modal, not PU_mod rather a priori `correlative' system of relative pronouns 12 Allow ZI PU and VI FAhA (which works rather as if we used `whus' instead of `how' 13 Change utterance ordinals to free modifiers for parallelism with `what/that, where/ there') in favor of 14 Allow only one NAhE before tense a more latinate - but unsystematic - assortment of words. 15 *ANNULLED* If anything, Idists tended towards a more Eurocentric (or 16 *ANNULLED* Francocentric) view than Esperantists did. Ido's affix 17 Allow forethought JOIKs system, however, attempted to be more like Loglan/Lojban. 18 Allow BU to suffix any word to produce a BY They took the view that predicates did not have intrinsic 19 Remove MEX relations parts of speech; thus any conversion of meaning through the use of affixes should be `reversible'. Thus, if `marteli' Change 1 is `to hammer', then `martelo' must mean an act of hammering, not (as in Esperanto) `a hammer'; or, if CURRENT LANGUAGE: Currently, logical connection of `martelo' means `a hammer', then `marteli' must mean `to be operands in the MEX grammar is allowed using EKs. a hammer'. One result of this is a somewhat larger However, JOIKs are not usable in MEX. assortment of affixes than Esperanto possesses, (for 62 PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow JOIKs as well as EKs on the same RATIONALE: Make this form more consistent with the logical grammatical level. connectives like "na.anai", where the marker for the left connectand precedes the connector. RATIONALE: 1) Operands are the formal analogues of sumti, and this Change 4 change makes operand connection formally identical to sumti connection, so that it can be learned by analogy CURRENT LANGUAGE: MEX ranges are handled with GAhO without a special exception. operators attached to mathematical parentheses. 2) Ranges ("from 3 to 10") can be easily expressed using PROPOSED CHANGE: Remove this capability. selma'o BIhI and GAhO, which are part of the JOIK system. Currently, these can only be expressed by a messy RATIONALE: See Change 1. This capability was never variation on left and right parentheses, which doesn't correctly specified, because only one expression can work well because no separator is defined between the appear between parentheses, whereas ranges require two upper and the lower bound. expressions inherently. Change 2 Change 5 CURRENT LANGUAGE: Only one EK_KE construction is allowed CURRENT LANGUAGE: It is possible to specify either NA or after a MEX operand. You cannot say "pa .a ke ri .e ci SE before selma'o A, JA, GIhA, or ZIhA, but they cannot ke'e .a ke vo .e mu" to mean "1 or (2 and 3) or (3 and both be specified unless -NAI follows. 4)". PROPOSED CHANGE: Remove this restriction. PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow more than one consecutive EK_KE construct. RATIONALE: The intent of a previous change just before the baseline was to allow both NA and SE (in that order) in RATIONALE: all cases, not just those where -NAI followed. This 1) same as 1) for Change 1. ability was accidentally omitted, so this is a "bug fix". 2) This change amounts to changing an "operand_C" to an "operand_B". The baselined version was created by Change 6 incorrectly copying existing text from the pre-baseline grammar, so this change is a "bug fix". CURRENT LANGUAGE: selma'o JOI can be converted with SE and negated with NAI like the logical connectives, but the Change 3 closely related selma'o BIhI cannot. PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow conversion and negation of BIhI. CURRENT LANGUAGE: In expressing intervals with explicit end-markers, the order is BIhI GAhO GAhO, where the first RATIONALE: Converted ranges allow "se bi'o" which means GAhO is the left endpoint and the second one is the right "to...from..." and negated ranges allow "bi'inai" which endpoint. means "not between". PROPOSED CHANGE: Put the first GAhO before the BIhI Change 7 CURRENT LANGUAGE: KI can be used either on an origin specifier or on a time and/or space tense to reset the scope or position of the origin. KI by itself is ungrammatical. PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow KI by itself. This returns the origin to the physical here and now. Also allow KI after BAI to set a default aspect value; "BAI KI sumti" sets the BAI aspect to the sumti, and "BAI KI KU" resets the aspect to its default. RATIONALE: This capability existed in the pre-baseline grammar, and was omitted in error during the tense redesign. Change 8 *ANNULLED* Change 9 CURRENT LANGUAGE: GIhEK_KE constructs have lower priority than basic GIhEKs. 63 PROPOSED CHANGE: Place GIhEK_KE constructs at the highest Change 12 priority among GIhEKs. CURRENT LANGUAGE: An initial FAhA cannot be followed by RATIONALE: This is the scheme used by sumti and operand space offsets, but only by a space interval (or by connection, where EK has the lowest priority (and is nothing at all). Analogously for a ZI in the time left-binding), EK_BO has medium priority (and is right- system. binding), and EK_KE has highest priority (and is again PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow FAhA followed by space-time-offsets left-binding). During the split between Institute Loglan and ZI followed by time offsets. and Lojban, sumti were changed to make EK_KE highest priority (and operands followed when MEX was redesigned) RATIONALE: This allows the currently ungrammatical but bridi-tails were not changed. "vizu'a" in the sense of "to the left of a nearby point". "zu'avi" on the other hand means "a point not far to the Change 10 left of here". This distinction is subtle, but real. The change to the time system follows by symmetry, CURRENT LANGUAGE: FAhO can appear in two possible places, although initial ZI is probably not of much use, since it at the end of text (including TO-TOI parenthesized text), means "a short/medium/long time distance from now" and just before the closing TUhU of a TUhE-TUhU very long without specifying either past or future. scope construct. PROPOSED CHANGE: Disallow FAhO before TUhU. Change 13 RATIONALE: FAhO was intended to signal the end of text CURRENT LANGUAGE: Utterance ordinals using MAI are unambiguously, but a parser problem forced it to be currently considered indicators, and can appear after any allowed in an additional context. That problem no longer word and get absorbed. exists. PROPOSED CHANGE: Shift MAI constructs to the more restrictive free-modifier grammar. Change 11 RATIONALE: The absorber routines in the parsing program CURRENT LANGUAGE: The grouping of PU_mods means that a which need to remove non-initial utterance ordinals free modifier at the end of a PU_mod applies to the whole before YACC sees them have to read an arbitrary number of PU_mod rather than just to the tense_modal at the end, PA or BY tokens, determine whether the next token is a whereas free modifiers embedded within the PU_mod refer MAI, and if so absorb, but if not push back all the PA/BY only to the tense_modals they follow. So "puxipa je stuff. This requires unbounded pushback capability in the puxire", which should mean "past-time t1 or past-time-t2" absorber, which is to be avoided. means "(past-time t1 or some-past-time)-sub-2". As a result, there would be no way to subscript a conjoint This change was proposed earlier but never consummated. tense, but it is not clear what such subscripts would A side effect of this change is that lexer_A would flag mean anyhow. utterance ordinals only, and the regular indicators (UI, PROPOSED CHANGE: Move the free modifier to tense_modal. CAI, Y) no longer need lexer flagging. Another side effect is that FUhO, DAhO, and POhA can be treated as RATIONALE: See CURRENT LANGUAGE section. indicators (and PEhA as a forethought indicator like BAhE) rather than with special magic. Change 14 CURRENT LANGUAGE: A tense can be prefixed with arbitrary numbers of NAhE tokens. PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow only one NAhE token at most. RATIONALE: The compounder needs to read past a potentially infinite number of NAhEs to decide whether what follows is a selbri (which is not compounded) or a tense. If this change is made, the compounder will always be able to decide within 2 tokens whether it has a compound or not. If multiple NAhEs are really needed, the tense can be expanded to use the predicate grammar instead. Change 15: *ANNULLED* Change 16: *ANNULLED* 64 Change 17 CURRENT LANGUAGE: There is a special category of predicates called "MEX relations" which have special CURRENT LANGUAGE: Logical operators can be represented in grammar; they represent mathematical relations. either forethought or afterthought (except for tenses and PROPOSED CHANGE: Assimilate MEX relations to ordinary abstractors), as can aspectual (BAI) operators, but the predicates. non-logical operators of JOI and BIhI have no forethought versions. RATIONALE: MEX relations as defined cannot be logically PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow "[SE] JOI GI [NAI]" and "[SE] BIhI connected and overlap ordinary predicates. The only MEX GI [NAI]" as new kinds of forethought connectives, relation cmavo defensible on Zipfean grounds is "du", analogous to the existing "stag GI [NAI]" (see the E- which is moved to selma'o GOhA. BNF grammar). Forethought would still be disallowed in tanru (no GUhEK equivalent of this) and where the GAhO endpoint markers are required. RATIONALE: Completeness, plus the fact that natural Letters, Comments, and Responses - Vincent Burch, John languages such as English usually represent JOIKs with Hodges, Bernard Golden, David Morrow forethought constructs ("the union of...and...", "from...to...", etc.) Institute Loglan had only one A Letter from Vincent Burch JOIK, "ze" (the equivalent of "joi"), so a forethought (italicized comments by Bob) construction was not felt necessary. The far more elaborate JOIKs of Lojban can easily be extended to ... First, a couple of lexical questions: forethought. gurni - does this mean grain (texture) or grain (cereal)? Change 18 [cereal] fepni - does the last place, "from..." indicate the major CURRENT LANGUAGE: "bu", selma'o BU, has a very restricted unit this is a division of, or the issuing authority? use. It can only appear after bare vowels (selma'o A, I, [the latter] and Y) to create the lerfu for those vowels. PROPOSED CHANGE: Allow "bu" after any (lexable) word A few suggestions about place structures: whatever, to create something equivalent to selma'o BY. [These are open to comments from the community, and will be In addition, change the standard lerfu for "y" from "ybu" considered along with others as part of the ongoing place to "y'ybu". Remove the ZAI...FOI construct for change of structure review.] character set, as well as the TEI construct. LAU is kept and extended to hold all lerfu prefixes, including "zai" cevni - there should be another place to indicate purview to specify character set and "tau" to force a next-lerfu ("of..."). This eliminates an inadvertent bias toward shift. monotheism, and allows anthropologists, or anyone else, to Composite symbols become represented by TEI letteral easily discuss deities such as Thor, the Norse god of ... FOI, which has the grammar of a single letteral. thunder. RATIONALE: This allows the creation of a bunch of new cange, farm and purdi, garden - need another place for lerfu. The Latin and Greek alphabets can be more readily crop(s) grown. accommodated; for example, "q" could have "kybu" as its lerfu. lerfu for the digits become possible; for example zekri - should insert "against..." to indicate the victim. "pabu" would be the digit 1, as opposed to the number 1. The concept that all crimes are crimes against the state is "ybu" causes problems with the parser, as the "y" is a relatively recent development of debatable merit. (I'm absorbed into the preceding token (as a hesitation noise) enough of an anarchist to think that "crime against the and is not available to be compounded with "bu". "y'ybu" state" comes close to being an oxymoron.) uses the lerfu "y'y" (alone representing "'") instead. The ZAI...FOI construct is meant to specify new vindu - should add a place for source ("from...") so that, character sets, but requires spelling out the name of the for example, le vindu fe le mledi, fungicide, can be character set in lerfu, for example "zai dy ebu vy abu ny distinguished from le vindu fi le mledi, mycotoxin. As a abu gy abu ry ibu foi" to enable Devanagari mode. This linguistic faulpelz, I'd like to know if there's a clear is ugly. Using the new flexibility of "bu", we can say way to condense those phrases, and others like them, into "zai .devanagar. bu" instead. (The pauses are needed in lujvo. names for morphological reasons.) [I assume, "...and to distinguish them". After all mledi vindu covers them both, but ambiguously. How about: mledi Change 19 krasi vindu to explicitly give the latter. "from source/origin" has a lexeme BAI and is probably not needed in the place structure, making the simpler tanru more clear to cover 'fungicide'.] 65 other two concepts. Not all concepts need to be "Surprise" is a good keyword for .ue, but when you write expressed in only two terms.] the dictionary, you should be sure to include the translation of .ue as "even...". My statement of mock 2) Similarly, there is no gismu for forest. A ricygri is mock-humility, "sogar ich kann Fehler machen," becomes mi a copse, or stand, or clump. Besides, a forest is more .ue pu'i srera. than a group of trees; it's an entire ecological community (or megacommunity?). A separate gismu is [You are NOT expressing surprise - as you said it is mock needed to describe things as sylvan or woodland, or to humility. Don't 'lie' with attitudinals; if you do, they make lujvo for forestry, woodcraft, or deforestation. don't serve their proper purpose. Another culture is [Depending on your purpose, you could therefore use the perfectly justified at treating them literally. How about most non-specific term: tricu foldi, or for your .o'anai .ianai. It is longer but clear.] specific uses tricu ciste, or even tricu cecmu. There needn't be one Lojban term for all uses of an English Now, I have a few suggestions for added cmavo: term. Note that I do not make lujvo at this point. I would analyze the tanru much more careful before doing 1) "... enough to ...", a modal indicating sufficiency or so.] potential, whether or not realized. [I need an example to tell your exact intent, but I think 3) How does one say galaxy or galactic? A targri is a the existing set will manage it.] star cluster, which is a far cry from the huge, orbiting system that is a galaxy. Again, there are concepts like 2) "... such that .../ ... so that .../ ... to the point intra-, trans-, and inter-, and extragalactic. of ...", a modal indicating actual result. This could be [banli tarci ciste, perhaps. The compounds are used used to translate such tings as "bored to tears," "freeze inexactly in English, by the way, so you have to be to death," or Carsonesque "it's so hot, that ..." careful. But they are not everyday words and could [ja'e] easily be 4 or 5 part compounds using kensa where needed.] 3) "... by ...", a modal to identify the point of attachment; used to translate such phrases as "lead by the nose," "hang by fingernails." [sedi'o] 4) "Heading/Title:", a tag to identify the following text as a heading or title to the body of text following it. The end of the title would be marked by ni'o or any of the mo'o series. As would hopefully be obvious in use, a title before nomo'o applies to entire body of text in question. Likewise before pamo'o unless there is already a title that it becomes a subheading under. Subsequent headings apply only to designated sections of text. This cmavo would share some of the function of ni'o, but apparently require its own lexeme. [This would require a grammar change, and isn't needed. Titles and Headings are metalinguistic, and should be identified as such. Our published examples have shown a couple of ways to do this.] Now for some gaps I see in the gismu list: 1) When I read your report on Logfest '90, I was amused by a collective blind spot. You make sure all the Terran continents are named, but you don't notice the absence of an adequate generic term. I'm not satisfied with bady- daplu (.a'unai!), and it couldn't be used in lujvo for concepts like transcontinental or intercontinental. [.a'unai is intended to be repulsion as contrary to interest (negative-interest), and seems strange in this context, but who knows. I would prefer using tumla to daplu, but otherwise see nothing wrong with your lujvo, which can in turn be used with ragve or jbini to get the 66 4) Going the other way on the size scale, the difference species which are at least ostensively monogamous, like between a village and a town (cmata'u) is qualitative Homo sapiens. more than quantitative. I can't come up with a lot of [I think xadba mapti fits your definition more clearly. lujvo, but it still bothers me. Look at the place structures of your underlying gismu, [You are right - the difference is qualitative. Define especially the final one that determines the tanru place the quality and you have your tanru. How about cange structure.] zarci tcadu?] cu'arselgre (cuxna se pagre). "x1 filters x2, stopping x3 5) I see no way to discuss expectation in a veridical (as and passing x4". The "selective barrier" can be a opposed to attitudinal) context, whether you mean construct of paper and metal for filtering oil, gas, or astrology, meteorology, Wellsian futurology, scientific air, or a piece of tinted glass for filtering light, or an knowledge such as "I expect a dropped object to fall," or assembly of components for filtering an electromagnetic world view such as "I expect children to respect their signal, an algorithm for filtering input, or a mind-set for elders." lujvo include disappoint = expectation-fail, filtering perceptions. optimist = good-expector, and pessimist = bad-expector (in contrast to xagnalkri, cynic = good-doubter). My first choice for keywords for tanru and lujvo is 'word [krici (and senpi) are key gismu, with expectation cluster' and 'affix cluster'; my second choice is 'modified referring to a belief about the future, about fate, or phrase' and 'modified word'. about fortune (balvi, dimna, cunso), depending on degree, [At least one person expressed a preference. Does anyone intent and scope] else care?] 6) In scientific contexts, it would be very helpful to I like the overall setup of kinship terms, including the have a gismu for taxon. No, that is not the particle proposed generics. The '988 panzi is basically included in that transmits government extortion; it is a jbena (if both are viewed tense-free). Inverting and branch/level/division in a system of hierarchical expanding panzi would make it nicely symmetrical to jbena. organization. Taxonomy would be taxon-system-study), I think "sire" and "dam" would also be welcome additions. depending on context, but the primary use would be to de- signate taxonomic levels. Thus, Felideae and Lamiaceae A good translation of "just married" might be puzize'u are both examples of family-taxon. This avoids the speni. confusion of trying to back-count the steps from jutsi to [I'll leave this one for a longer discussion of tenses. kingdom. Maybe next issue.] [jutsi conveys the series of species within a taxonomic hierarchy, with klesi used in a less rigorous context.] The attitudinals and discursives are both in the UI lexeme. Does this mean that the attitudinals can be compounded with I could go on, but it's late. Ni'o, . . . the discursives, or just with each other? [No rules against it - the line between the two is rather A few of my lujvo that I'm proudest of: arbitrary, but beware of possible misinterpretations.] kaurjutsi (kampu jutsi). The place structure is "x1 is the Would it be worth adding another cmavo to have a discursive common name used by x2 for the life-form called x3 for "ironically"? If the answer to both of these last (Linnaean binomial) by author x4." I expect this lujvo questions is yes, then .uecu'i would combine with would see more use in classrooms and laboratories than the "ironically" to translate the German discursive original gismu. With ki'a and the vo'a series, it's easy "ausgerechnet." to ask questions like "what's the common name for this?" or [I don't know the German word, but irony is simply "who calls it that?" or "what's the scientific name for expressed with .ianai, in an otherwise positive claim.] tapeworm?" An example of usage is: le ricpurdi srasu ku kaurjutsi le merko lai Dactylis glomeratus la lineius i le I propose a new procedure with the names and acronyms of jipcirjma ku kaurjutsi le brito vo'i (Orchardgrass is the nations and other groups. Each word of the name should be American common name of D. glomeratus [L.]. The Brits call examined to see if it is intrinsically a name, or if it's it cocksfoot.) "just a word." (Yes, I know that this can be an arbitrary "le ricpurdi srasu ku" should be "lu ricpurdi srasu li'u" distinction.) The names should be rendered phonetically or "la ricpurdi srasu ku", since it's a name. Also, since into the best-fit cmene, and the words should be translated you are dealing with names, rather than with the and then cmenified. Acronyms should either be the result classification system, cmene should be the underlying of this process, or a simple rendition of the acronym from gismu." the source language. Thus, we might discuss la ge'oSySySyRur or its Lojbanic equivalent, but not la relxadba (re xadba). "x1 is the mate of x2". The mnemonic .ubuSySyRyr. Hopefully, we can be more consistent (with is "pair-half". I originally coined it with gloves, socks, whatever convention) than English speakers. USSR is a and shoes in mind, but it can easily be extended to animal translated acronym, but KGB is the acronym of the Russian phrase that means "Committee for State Security." If we're 67 going to keep the original acronym, we might as well tongue ideal. Machine translation FROM Lojban TO natural pronounce it kah-geh-beh, and leave it in Cyrillic. languages would seem much more practical than any other kind of machine translation. It seems to me the project Of course, that task requires more lujvo, to translate the most likely to give tangible results within a small number various governmental concepts. Republic is easy, that's of years. It is a project that can be worked on by a small ka'irtru (krati turni). I've put some effort into coining number of widely scattered people. It is a project that lujvo for the rest, but it's a challenge to find metaphors may be "academically respectable", suitable for theses and which accurately convey the essence of the terms and remain grants. It can be done by people who are not terribly culturally neutral. Confederacy, for example, is listed in fluent in anything but their native tongue. Intermediate most dictionaries as synonymous with federation. The results, software that gives bad but decipherable difference is more or less clearly understood, however, by translations, can still be useful as research and as speakers - especially those who take a dim view of central teaching tools. Altogether, in my opinion, enough to give authority. a "reason for existence", or a practical focus, to la [The terms are pretty much synonymous, unless you have a lojbangirz. if efforts toward a mass movement fizzle. context where one was chosen and acquired secondary connotations, as in the U.S. Civil War.] Unfortunately, I am not a computer-science person, and I have concluded that I am not likely to become one. My motivation is too weak for the work that would involve, --------------------- given my starting point. Hence I cannot contribute [John Hodges takes a different perspective on people's personally to a machine-translation effort. I am starting reasons for learning Loglan/Lojban (his reasons apply out (once more on a new direction, toward graduate study of regardless of the language name). His arguments are sound philosophy, in logic and ethics. My interest in Lojban though pessimistic; I feel a little optimism is necessary will be in its potential as a language for thinking clearly for anyone to choose to learn an artificial language in. (Pardon my English.) expecting practical benefit. Nora points out that John and I both have omitted the reason most people who have The class I taught never got to the "logical connectors", actually knuckled down and started learning the language - and, or, xor, not, if, because, etc.... I recall you as a linguistic toy, a personal mind expander. This minor, expressing a hope that a parser that could look ahead more totally impractical aspect may be the spark to get a than one token might allow a simplification of Lojban's 'movement' started once we have a larger speaker-base. system of logical connectors. Here also, then, the contributions of CS people are of high value. from John Hodges, on 'Why Lojban' Lojban's value as a teaching vehicle for Logic, or (perhaps I've pondered the subject of "Why Lojban?" We need to more likely) for linguistics, are potentially reasons for provide answers on an individual level, "Why should I study learning Lojban, for those who already wish to learn logic Lojban now?" Lojban may have many uses, but not all of or linguistics. Someone would have to write a textbook on them can be used as reasons for an individual to learn it. logic or linguistics that used Lojban as such a vehicle. E.g. John Cowan's suggestion that L. may be valuable in Who knows, I might do that someday. I'll keep it in mind. linguistic research as a case study in the process of creolization. (Though, since creolization is an example of I have thought of the appeal of exclusivity and secrecy; language evolution, it would seem to me for that purpose given that so few people know this language, hobbyists one would want an evolved language, not a constructed one.) might use it for private speech or writing. Diaries and [Bob: If you have fluent speakers, one would expect the intimate conversation... but is that enough motivation for processes of language evolution to be the same.] If there learning a language, even one relatively easy to learn? were a sizeable L-speaking community, a researcher might Codes and ciphers would serve those purposes with less become interested. But I doubt if any individual would effort. I have thought of calling L. "Dragontongue", learn Lojban in order to improve the opportunities for lin- recalling my Dad's comment that Lojban looked like nothing guistic research into creolization. human. Fantasy fans might be attracted to it because of that. Again, I doubt this motivation is strong enough. The original "basic three reasons" still hold, in varying amounts for different people. The hope that those who I have written on the global-common-tongue idea; given think in Lojban will think "better" in some measurable way, start-up-costs, increasing returns to scale, and inertia of more flexibly and/or more logically, is the one that will established standards, I think our only hope is through provide my own motivation. Potential usefulness as a com- machine translation. AFTER a dramatically successful test puter language may motivate Computer Science researchers. of Sapir-Whorf, the S-W angle may give us another selling Potential as a Global Auxiliary Language, a "common tongue" point. Until MT or SW materializes, I think Esperanto owns to reduce language barriers, may interest some more. the field, and even they have a very uphill fight. I think the most-likely-future is for the largest natural languages I have written before on the possible aid that the to grow and consolidate. In areas with a lot of small, computer-science people could give to the global-common- fiercely loved ethnic or national languages, AND no clearly 68 dominant existing common tongue, Esperanto will have its grammatical reference books. For example, Plena Analiza appeal to the sensible minority. Barring a sudden global Gramatiko has 436 numbered paragraphs describing the attack of sanity, there will be no global common tongue. language in detail, but that is a minimum figure for the But given MT from L. to the largest N natural languages, L. number of rules because within each paragraph are could sweep the field. sections and subsections with discussions of doubtful points and even exceptions not conforming to the published Plena Gramatiko (Complete Grammar). Kalman [Bob: Following is a last, more scholarly examination of Kalocsay3 describes the language in 288 paragraphs in the question of Esperanto and its '16 Rules', written by an which, just as in Plena Analiza Gramatiko, there are expert in the History of Esperanto and International several sections and subsections. Does the figure 288 Languages.] signify simplification of the grammatical analysis of Esperanto or did Kalocsay omit some rules? COUNTING THE GRAMMATICAL RULES OF ESPERANTO Bernard Golden In a manual titled Gramatiko de Esperanto, Miroslav Malovec4 requires a little over 150 paragraphs and 16 rules - for propaganda purposes only sections to teach the grammar, while Gaston Waringhien's brochure gives a concise overview of the essence of For more than a century propagandists have tediously and Esperanto grammar in only 66 paragraphs5. repulsively disseminated the falsehood that the grammar of Esperanto consists of only sixteen rules. Plena The Analytic School Analiza Gramatiko (Complete Analytical Grammar)1 comments more realistically on the so-called "complete Grammar of According to the doctrine of the Analytic School (Analiza Esperanto" which is the title of the sixteen rules in the Skolo) founded by Luis Mimo, the ingenious Fundamental Fundamenta Krestomatio (Fundamental Chrestomathy): "To set of sixteen rules is incomplete but can be completed want to limit the fundamentals of Esperanto to that by application of logic which determines the structure of scanty grammar and rely exclusively on it in order to the language up to the last detail6. Mimo stresses the discuss the main questions of our language would indeed point that the sixteen Fundamental rules impress learners be an unscientific and infantile attitude" (P. 18). Such favorable but they in no way determine how the language a Lilliputian grammar is evidently insufficient for is to be used7. clarification of how the language is used, and it must be completed by rules formulated in other parts of the "Now, the rules not given by Zamenhof, which are Fundamento (Foundation of Esperanto) or illustrated by immanent in the language, have been given by the Zamenhof's own usage. Analytic School by means of a systematic analysis and control with the help of the sole means of language An unsuccessful attempt to estimate the number of rules analysis, logic, which in every case gives the correct answer; just one, because, already having been To the best of my knowledge the first Esperantist who provided with its elements, nothing in the artificial explored the question of the number of grammatical rules language can be capricious" (p. 241). in Esperanto is Douglas B Gregor2. He emphasizes that Zamenhof never said that Esperanto has only sixteen Mimo's Kompleta lernolibro de regula Esperanto (Complete rules. It is a question not of sixteen rules but only textbook of regular Esperanto) was published in 1973. It sixteen descriptive items. "They are simple 16 has a 31-lesson systematic grammar, but the presentation heterogeneous traits of Esperanto which Zamenhof for some is not complete since the second part has not yet been reason wanted to emphasize" (p. 8). Consequently, Gregor published. Still another one of Mimo's books exists only gave up trying to ascertain the actual number of rules in in manuscript form: Esperanto por la jaroj du mil Esperanto. (Esperanto for the year 2000). Consequently, the number of rules which can arise from the logical analysis of the Is it not possible to compare Esperanto, even in an 16-rule Fundamental grammar by adherents of the Analytic approximate manner, with ethnic languages in order to School is not ascertainable. have an idea of the number of its rules? In the study referred to above, Gregor reports that he made an attempt Conclusion to compare Esperanto with an ethnic language when he compiled a list of 6000 examples illustrating rules about Even if an investigation were to be undertaken for the language usage in Italian, but he did not succeed in purpose of listing each separate illustration of drawing conclusions about Esperanto. Esperanto language usage (as Gregor did for the Italian language), I have the impression that no two grammarians Grammars and grammatical compendia would induce more or less the same number of rules. The only judicious answer to the question about the number of An idea of the magnitude of Esperanto grammar can be grammatical rules in Esperanto is that which Gregor gave acquired from the number of paragraphs or sections in at the end of his study: "the grammatical rules of Es- 69 peranto are much more than sixteen; however, Esperanto le lojbo se ciska has fewer rules (i.e. items to be memorized) than other languages." Let's start with some comparative artificial linguistics: Notes From Nick Nicholas: 1 KALOCSAY, K. and WRINGHIEN, G. Plena analiza gramatiko A text in VolapЃk, Esperanto, Ido, and Interglossa. To de Esperanto. 4th edition Rotterdam: Universala avoid the usual Pater Noster, I translated a Suzanne Vega Esperanto-Asocio; 1980. 598 p. song. I do not guarantee my stylistics in VolapЃk and Ido. [The VolapЃk was corrected with the help of Dean Gahlon, 2 GREGOR, Douglas B. Kiom da reguloy vere havas Esperanto? and the corrected text with notes from both are found in Science Revuo. 1982; 33 (1 [139]): 5-9. the text below.] 3 KALOCSAY, K…l…man. Rendszeres Eszperant• nyelvt…n. LANGUAGE (1987) Budapest: Tankonyvkiad•; 1966. 243 p. If language were liquid 4 MALOVEC, Miroslav. Gramatiko de Esperanto. Trebic it would be rushing in (Czechoslovakia): 1988 102 p. Instead here we are in a silence more eloquent 5 WARINGHIEN, G. A.B.C. d'Esp‚ranto … l'usage de ceux qui than any word could ever be aiment les lettres. Paris: SAT-Amikaro; 1967 74 p. Words are too solid 6 SULCO, Rikardo (= Richard Schulz). Sur la vojoj de la they don't move fast enough Analiza Skolo. Paderborno: Esperatno-centro; 1987 278 to catch the blur in the brain p. that flies by and is gone 7 SULCO, Rikardo (= Richard Schulz). Pledo por unueca lingvo. Paderborno: Esperatno-centro; 1985 287 p. I'd like to meet you in a timeless placeless place somewhere out of context from David Morrow and beyond all consequences [Bob: David was apparently a bit upset at comments from Let's go back to the building Ralph Dumain on the Lojban community, and at Donald on Little West Twelfth Harlow's comments.] it is not far away and the river is there I am not a "computer nerd" and I am not much interested in and the sun and the space science fiction. I am a middle aged blue collar worker, I they are all laying low only own a word processor, and the only fiction I read is and we'll sit in the silence usually Middle English or a few types of modern writing that comes rushing in that are not speculative. I suspect some Esperantists see and is gone a real threat... I won't use words again [With this, let us end the discussion of Lojban and they don't mean what I meant Esperanto, at least until there are more speakers of Lojban they don't say what I said (especially those who know Esperanto as well), who can They're just the crust of the meaning offer facts and experiences, instead of opinions. Thus: with realms underneath 'n' (the end of 'Esperanto and Lojban discussion')] Never touched Never stirred Never even moved through 70 PљK (VolapЃk, 1879) Mi sxatus renkonti vin en sentempa senloka loko If pЃk „binom-la flumlik1 ie ekster cxirkauxteksto „ininjogom-”v kaj trans cxiuj sekvoj Plaso is binobs in stil2 pЃk”fikum Ni reiru al la konstruajxo ka evelo kanom v”d anik cxe la Malgranda Okcidenta Dekdua gxi ne estas malproksime V”ds binoms tu fimik kaj la rivero estas tie no mufoms s„to vifo kaj la suno kaj la spaco al beget”n nekleilati3 in zebЃm kusxas neefekte [not flashy] kel ailoveflitom ed egolom kaj ni sidos en la silento kiu enfluegas kaj foriras Vipob oli kolk”m”n in top netimik netopik Mi ne uzos vortojn denove sem”po pl” zisi„m tiuj ne esprimas kion mi esprimis „ movЃ sukads valik tiuj ne diras kion mi diris Ili estas nur la krusto de la signifo Gegolobs”d in bumot kun landegoj sube len Balsetelik VesЃda SmasЃt neniam tusxitaj no binom fagik neniam perturbitaj e flum binom us neniam ecx tramovitaj e sol e spads valik nepleidoms [are unproud] ed osiedobs in stil2 LINGUO (Ido, 1907) kel ainingonom ed egolom Se linguo esus liquida No odenugebob v”dis ol enfluegus no maloms kelosi imalob Vice hik ni estas no pЃkoms kelosi ipЃkob en silento plu eloquenta Binoms te lujal si„ma kam irgatempe povus irga vorto ko kin„ns diso nevelo pebemuf”l vorti esas tro solida nevelo pemuf”l oli ne movas sat rapide nevelo s„go pedugol”l kapti la desdistintajo en la cerbero qua preterflugas e foriras 1Nick: flumlik - I had vatik, wet [watery]. The original is liquid. Mi amus te renkontar 2Dean: Your 'neb”set' [here] seems to be a noun form of in sentempa senloka loko neb”sik='silence'. My dictionary lists 'stil' as a noun ulube exter kuntexto meaning 'silence'. e trans omna konsequi 3Dean: interesting formation for 'blur', by the way! Nick: Lit. not-clear-thing. Cf. my Esp maldistintajxo. Ni retroirez ad la konstrukturo che Mikra Uesta Dekeduesma ol ne esas dista LINGVO (Esperanto, 1887) e la rivero esas ibe e la suno e la spaco (An x means that the previous letter has a cap over it.) omni jacas base Se la lingvo estus likva e ni sidos en la silento gxi enfluegus qua enfluegas e foriras Anstatauxe cxi tie ni estas en silento pli elokventa Mi ne uzos vorti itere ol iam povus ia ajn vorto olti ne esprimas quon mi esprimis olti ne diras quon mi diris Vortoj tro solidas Oli esas nur la krusto dil signifiko ili ne movigxas suficxe rapide kun landegi sube kapti la maldistintajxon en la cerbo Nultempe tusxita kiu preterflugas kaj foriras nultempe perturbita nultempe mem tramovita 71 Interglossa, ancestor of Glosa, is interesting in that it Ivan Derzhanski supplied a corresponding translation into emulates English & Chinese in having an isolative Intal: structure, and jettisoning the parts-of-speech distinctions endemic to flexional/agglutinative lingos. It is LINGUO (Intal, 1970) essentially Basic English in Greek; there are about 10 verbs, qualified by 'amplifiers' ending in -o. Nouns are Si le linguo esud likvid made distinct from (presumably) adverbs by being prefixed it vud influega by a location preposition, a possessive, a numeral, or a Vise to yen nos 'general article' like all, some, or the default 'u'. in silentes maks elokvent kam eni vort potud ever es U GLOSA (Interglossa, 1943) Le vortos es tro solid Postulo u Glosa habe liquo; les non mova sat rapid Re forto kine in. por kapta le nebulaj nel serber Na habe loco para vice re kel preterfluga e davada in no-Phono; Su dicte major de pan Verba u Chron. Mi volud vu renkontra in sintemp sinlok lok Plu Verba habe stereo excesso. somlok ekstra kontekst Mu no kine satio celero e ultra omni konsekvens tendo u Rapo de no-Luce-re in Cerbera; Su kine tele in Aero plus apo. An le Min Oksident Desduesmi a le konstruktur let nos rivada Mi volo habe syn Tu non es fern in Topo minus Topo plus minus Chron, e le river es ta extra plu syn Logo-re e le sun e le spas plus tele pan Sequo. les omnos yasa bas e nos ve sida in le silentes Peti Na kine verso a mi Cameri kel influega e davada loco micro occidento Via mono du. Re no habe tele Mi non ve uza vortos plus plus u Potami habe loco apo. les non esprima ko mi esprimed U Heli syn Volumo habe non-alto, les non dira ko mi dired plus na post gene sedi in no_Phono; Es nur le krust del sens Su forto kine in plus apo. kun landegos sube Nultemp tokat Mi no acte utilo plu Verba itero. Nultemp perturbat Mu no dicte Re; Mi pre dicte. Nultemp mem tramovat Mu no habe u Significo; Mi pre date. Mu eque no major de Area de Significo1 syn plu hypo mega Loco, Here is Bob's corresponding translation for Lojban. Not zero tem ge acte sensitivo, only does it allow comparison with the other ALs, but this zero tem ge micro mote, particular text shows off a lot of features about Lojban. cleisto zero tem ge kine trans. Bob comments on the translation, presents a literal English equivalent, and comments on the effort and its implications 1Despite my criticisms: there are some cute syntactic for artificial languages. features in this Lingo. Take my translation of with realms underneath: with plural underneath big place. (Lojban, 1991) 1. The translation is not quite as literal as Nick's appears to be (not being familiar with the other three ALs). I have tried to maintain a sense of the style, denotation, and connotation, of the words used. However, Lojban is NOT an Indo-European language, and certain things must be rephrased in order to be both (unambiguously) grammatical and to capture the meaning correctly. 2. Lojban is less tolerant of metaphor than other languages, but does allow analytic metaphors (where the predicate place structures are semantically preserved in the combination). 72 3. Nick describes the text as a song. I saw no apparent and then is-past. match in rhythm and/or syllable count between lines of the English and the AL versions. I presume therefore that the I desire the event of meeting you translation is in free verse and is not intended to match during no-when, at nowhere, the music (which I don't know anyway). according-to-reference-frame none in the aftermath of all result-dooms. mela'e lu bangu li'u ni'o (Suggestion!) We return (ourselves-elliptical) to the loi bangu cu litki building .inaja ri sutfle fi ti which is at that called 'Little type-of West Twelfth- .iku'i na go'i thing'. .ili'i nunsma semau ro valsi Other-than far (it is - elliptical). temau leka zanselsku The river is at (it-elliptical). The sun and the environment .i loi valsi cu duksligu are neutrally-other-than observed (neither extreme of .i ri na sutra co banzu observed/non-observed) le mu'e kavbu le besysutra We there-yonder sit in-environment poi sutfau this (mass of) silence which swift-flowingly-happens gi'e ba purci and then is past. .i mi djica lenu penmi do (Intention!) I in-the-future-never use (of the mass of) ca noda vi node Words. ma'inai rodi They (words) do-not mean my thing-meant ba'o ro jagdimna and are-not forms-of-expressing my things-expressed and are skins of the meaning, characterized by .i .e'u mi'o xruti fi le dinju the grand-territory inside pe vi la cmalu ke stici gaimoi which never is touched .i na'e darno and never is stirred .i le rirxe cu zvati and never least-superlative passed-through. .i le solri .e le vanbi cu no'e se zgana ---------------------- .i mi'o vu zutse va'o Now a note/complaint/what have you which I think is most lei smaji poi sutflefau revealing of the nature and 'neutrality' of the other gi'e ba purci languages. In the translations of the last verse, specifically: .i .ai mi banoroi pilno loi valsi .i ri na smuni lemi selsmu "I won't use words again gi'e na velsku lemi selsku they don't mean what I mean gi'e pilka le smuni sekai they don't say what I say ..." le baltutra nenri poi noroi se pencu Nick translated both occurrences of English words 'mean' gi'e noroi se jicla and 'say' with the same counterpart in each of the other gi'e noroi mecrai se pagre three languages. But the English words do not denote the same thing. When a person says something, it is different Following is a literal English translation of the Lojban: from when words say something (in Lojban terms, the human is the expresser x1 of cusku, while the words are the That represented by "Language". New topic. medium of expression x4 of cusku). Likewise, the "meaning" of words is semantically distinct from the "meaning (The mass of) Language is liquid, intention" of one who might use the words. This is only if it (language) fast-flows to here. intuitive to an English speaker, who knows the range of But not-true, the latter. meaning of the words. Abstract-experiencing-of event-of-silence which-is-more- than each (any) word, more-in the property of ameliorative(good)-being-expressed. (The mass of) Words are excess-solid. They (words) are not quick such-that sufficient in the abstract-achievement of capturing the brain-quick- thing which quickly-occurs 73 If each of the other ALs use the same word to capture Lojbanist who gets by the initial hurdle of unfamiliar both senses of "mean" and "say", then I assert that they words and structures more rapidly acquires that added are flawed and biased towards English and/or every other competence that is considered 'knowing' a language. language that blurs these distinctions. I suspect that such blurring, if in other languages, will tend to be only in the culturally similar European ones. If Esperanto, A Lojbanic Fairy Tale Ido, and VolapЃk all borrowed European roots along with by John Cowan their complete semantic baggage, then those languages are going to be inherently less understandable to a non- [The following appears to be a lot of text, but it employs European who does not share the cultural background. the repetition and simple syntax inherent to good fairy This is a particularly insidious kind of bias because, as tales. Also, since the tale should be recognizable to most one Esperantist has pointed out, it seems that both the Lojbanists, it should be relatively easy to understand from European and non-European are having 'the shared a word-for word translation effort. I have made it still experience' of acquiring the AL they both learn. But for easier, by forcing line breaks at key grammatical one learner, it is predominantly a regularized, simplified, boundaries. Give it a try; turn to the English translation form of their own language; for the other, the subtle se- later only if necessary.] mantics needed for poetry is not shared. (This criticism applies more obviously for BASIC English, since people can easily see the confusing semantic range of the word-plus- la pexykerf. .e le ci cribe vau preposition combinations that make that language work.) I do not claim that the difficulty is insurmountable. ni'oni'o fu'e ka'u le ci prenu cribe cu se zdani Certainly non-Europeans have written poetry in Esperanto tu'i le tricu that was understood and appreciated by Europeans, possibly .i le je'a barda cribe po'u la pafrib. in a way that is not as easily possible if the European had goi ko'a vau to learn the native language of the poet, which has a much .i le no'e barda cribe po'u la mamrib. heavier cultural/connotative load. I suspect that goi ko'e vau (European) speakers who can converse in Esperanto fluently .i le to'e barda cribe po'u la ve'arib. with non-Europeans, and who therefore are thinking in Es- goi ko'i vau peranto rather than translating from their native language as they go, have largely bypassed this difficulty. ni'o ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo citka kabri .i le ko'a kabri cu je'a barda My points can be summarized as two: .i le ko'e kabri cu no'e barda 1. I agree with those that criticize ALs implicitly as .i le ko'i kabri cu to'e barda being languages that people think they know after finishing the textbook. ni'o ji'a ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo zutse stizu 2. As a corollary, it is a disadvantage for an AL to be .i le ko'a stizu cu je'a barda 'much like' any other single language in particular. The .i le ko'e stizu cu no'e barda speakers of that language have either a benefit or a .i le ko'i stizu cu to'e barda handicap, depending on how you look at it; they have an easier time learning subtle features of the AL and a harder ni'o ji'a ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo sipna ckana time recognizing the differences that MUST be present for .i le ko'a ckana cu je'a barda it to be an effective intercultural communications tool. .i le ko'e ckana cu no'e barda The former is an unfair bias; the latter calls into .i le ko'i ckana cu to'e barda question whether the AL is suitable as an IL. Since I lead the Lojban effort, I of course (biasedly?) support Lojban as overcoming these issues. Lojban is just as easy to learn as other ALs with lots of regularity and simplification. But since the language is tied to a predicate grammar strikingly different from any other lan- guage, a speaker translating anything but the simplest statements must significantly reformulate the expression (as shown in the translation above) in order to properly express it in Lojban. The result is easily understood to another Lojban speaker, and indeed in back-translation, is not too difficult in English. But a Lojbanist MUST think clearly about what s/he is saying in order to even say the sentence; those who use other ALs do not necessarily do so. Thus, I think Lojban aids a learner in acquiring the 'different perspective' of a second language, and a 74 ni'o le cribe cu cikna .i ko'a catlu le vo'a stizu gi'e tisna le kabri lei cilmo gurni gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa mu'i le nu citka le pamoi sanmi lu daxire pu zutse le mi stizu li'u .i ku'i lei gurni cu dukse le ka glare kei le pu'u citka kei .i ko'e catlu le vo'a stizu seki'u le zu'o le cribe cu cadzu gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa .i melbi djedi lu dexire pu zutse le mi stizu li'u ni'o le verba po'u la pexykerf. goi ko'u .i ko'i catlu le vo'a stizu cu catlu le nenri be le zdani gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa .i no prenu cu nenri lu dixire pu ba'e daspo zutse semu'i le nu ko'u nenri cadzu le mi stizu li'u ni'o ko'u zgana le ci kabri .i ko'a catlu le vo'a ckana .i ko'u xagji gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa semu'i le nu jdice le nu citka lei gurni lu daxici pu sipna vreta le mi ckana li'u .i pamai ko'u troci citka lei ko'a gurni .i ku'i ri dukse je'a glare .i remai ko'u troci citka lei ko'e gurni .i ku'i ri dukse to'e glare .i cimai ko'u troci citka lei ko'i gurni .i ri prane le ka glare semu'i le zu'o ko'u citka pi ro lei ko'i gurni ni'o ko'u zgana le ci stizu .i ko'u tatpi semu'i le nu jdice le nu zutse .i pamai ko'u troci zutse le ko'a stizu .i ku'i ri dukse je'a galtu .i remai ko'u troci zutse le ko'e stizu .i ku'i ri dukse to'e galtu .i cimai ko'u troci zutse le ko'i stizu .i ri prane le ka galtu semu'i le zu'o ko'u zutse le ko'i stizu seri'a le nu ri porpi ni'o ko'u zgana le ci ckana .i ko'u mu'erta'i semu'i le nu jdice le nu sipna vreta .i pamai ko'u troci vreta le ko'a ckana .i ku'i ri dukse je'a jdari .i remai ko'u troci vreta le ko'e ckana .i ku'i ri dukse to'e jdari .i cimai ko'u troci vreta le ko'i ckana .i ri prane le ka jdari semu'i le zu'o ko'u sipna ni'o le cribe cu xruti gi'e djica lei gurni ni'o ko'a catlu le vo'a kabri gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa lu da pu citka piso'u lei mi gurni li'u .i ko'e catlu le vo'a kabri gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa lu de pu citka piso'u lei mi gurni li'u .i ko'i catlu le vo'a kabri gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa jbobliku lu di pu citka pi ba'e ro lei mi gurni li'u 75 .i ko'e catlu le vo'a ckana A Letter From Sylvia Rutiser to T. Peter Park gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa [Translation, commentary, and parse diagram later in the lu dexici pu sipna vreta le mi ckana li'u section. This is the uncorrected letter which was actually sent, and has some minor semantics errors, though it should .i ko'i catlu le vo'a ckana be understandable.] gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa lu dixici pu je ba'e ca sipna vreta di'o zoi .kuot. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax, VA 22031 .kuot. le mi ckana li'u de'i la'e li so pi'e pa vau coi doi ti.pitr. ni'o ri'a la'edi'u ko'u cikna .i la bab. pu cpedu lenu mi cu spuda ledo xatra po le xriso .i le cribe cu catlu ko'u nunsalci seki'u le nu ko'u bajra cliva .i loi snime poi puza farlu ku'o ca runme .i le cribe noroi ku'a ba viska ko'u .i le solri cu gusni ga'a mi ni'o la bab. puzi te benji le nuzba po'u lenu la .atlstan. fa'o goi ko'a pu klama la iutas. fu leko'a karce mu'i lenu ko'a djica lenu tavla le lobypli sedi'o la iutas. ni'o mi ca troci lenu cilre lo'i cmavo .i .e'o ko fraxu mi leni cizra gerna po mu'i la'edi'u ni'o .e'o ledo tcima cu pluka .i .e'o ko kanro coi la silvian. A letter from Michael Helsem [Translation, commentary, and parse diagram later in the section.] de'e fi la maiky'elsym. xatra de'i li pabiki'ofeiki'osono .i coi do'opezi .i .e'a selmi'a minseldunda vau .i .u'use'i ri mleca da poi mi ke'a djica ku'o ri'a lemi bazi mextutra nunli'u .i ni'o mi do ckire le selbei judri be la .atlstan. no'u caze'evu ki'a .i mi ri ba xagdicra la'a pu lemi vuzyseltei .i ni'o di'e cnino ke mitfa'e lerpoi .i lu .ua vibjbi vau li'u zmadu lei mordrata leka plikakne su'omei zo'ope'icu'i .i to'u .a'o sarji balvi snada vau mi'e maikl. A la lojbangirz. Group Translation Project? In 1982-1984, Jim Carter wrote extensively in the then- version of Loglan (he claimed an hour a day). Because the language was ill-defined, he used several non-standard usages, and the arguments over these non-standard usages were among the precipitating events for the political squabble that effectively destroyed the Institute (and still haunts us today). Before this happened, though, he wrote and published several pieces in Loglan, including at least two short stories. These stories were written in the language, not translated from English, although Jim did provide rough translations into English. The two stories, "The Welding Shop" and "Akira" are the most extensive writing ever in Loglan. As original works, they serve as a starting point for a Loglan literature. Jim has given us copyright release and permission to by Sylvia Rutiser retranslate or update (or what have you) his texts into the current Lojban, and to use them as the basis for teaching 76 materials and/or a reader. We intend to do so. Or rather, tanru are literally translated; many or most of these need I would like to see you, the Lojban community, make this to be re-invented or at least thought about. effort. This is not a trivial job. Some of Jim's variant Akira reeled in the fish to his inflatable boat. It was constructs were not added to Lojban. Jim tended to use fat, spotted, silvery, and delicious. He put it in his vocabulary based on the old Loglan vocabulary, which was icebox. The oven-like sun cooked his brown skin, and he studded with gawdawful tanru. Lojban, of course, has some retired under the canopy. But he suddenly looked up, for 40% more gismu and a richer grammar than the earlier Log- something was making a line of smoke through the sky, and lan; hence its expressive power is greater and the phrasing suddenly exploded with a flash and a clap of thunder. should be changed. Another difficulty factor is length. Someone floated down on a parachute. Akira thought, "Maybe The stories are not short, running several typewritten the pilot needs to be rescued." He threw up the kite-sail pages, perhaps 170 and 90 paragraphs, respectively. into the wind and sailed toward him. He thought, "This Until the effort is completed, we are asking everyone to will make a great (bold) story when I tell it. My young try their hand at this. Participate to any extent you friends will love it." choose. Translate a word, a sentence, or the entire paragraph. Even the most novice among you can reinvent a tanru or two. .akir. (he-5) turn-pull(s) the fish to his-5 air-full boat. Send your contribution to us, and we'll collate ideas and It (the fish) is fat and round-marked and silver-like and print the best result(s). People who submit a full delicious. paragraph translation will be given additional paragraphs He-5 puts it (the fish) inside his-5 ice-box. to work on, and we'll publish these results as well. The oven-sun cooks his-5 brown skin and therefore- motivatedly recur-self-safe-puts (himself) under the Suggestions - please provide an English equivalent for shadow-producer. whatever you submit so that reviewers know what part of the Short-time he-5 suddenly up-looks. text you are expressing, and can check their (and your) Because-motivationally something makes a line which-is understanding. Make tanru or lujvo as you choose. If you smoke through the sky, and suddenly explodes (which-is?) don't know how to use rafsi in making lujvo use the ex- shock-bright and a thunder/lightning-producer. panded form of replacing the final vowel of each but the Something-4 down-float-flies using-tool a fall-cloth. last term with 'y', or even hyphenate the gismu together so Said by .akir., who thinks: Perhaps the flyer-driver we know you want a lujvo instead of a tanru. (An example: dangerous-without-makes needingly. rilti-cadzu-bende -> riltycadzybende = marching-band). Said by narrator: He-5 throws the flyer-sail at the breeze Feel free to comment and suggest other conventions. This and sail-goes towards it-4. is an experiment and we don't know the best ways for it to Said by him-5: It (the event-just-mentioned = the danger- work. without-making) will bravely be a history of-something-3 The complete result will be assembled into a story, by me. checked by Jim Carter to ensure he is willing to have his My young friends will long-time-be-fond-of name on the result, and published as a whole. All it-3. contributors to the final text will be noted for historical Note: Sylvia says that she is not sure that her purposes. tanru/lujvo are the best, and was most dissatisfied by the The first paragraph of the "Akira" story (which is a sci- metaphor for falling by parachute. Feel free to suggest ence fiction story of a sort), previously offered to the better ones. computer mailing-list "lojban-list", will serve as start- off and example. The process of preparing the paragraph is Here is Sylvia's text, as submitted uneditted. As shown, to give you an idea of what to expect with later printed, it has some semantic errors. After wards, Bob paragraphs. The Lojban effort was by Sylvia Rutiser. discusses these errors, and suggests corrections. But the Since only one person worked on this effort, everyone is text is grammatical, and should be readable without the invited to comment on the tanru she chose, or to suggest corrections, especially if you've read the intermediate corrections. Then go to work on the second paragraph, English above. which follows thereafter. Deadline for publication submittals is approximately 20 May 1991 (though we'll la .akir. goi ko'u ca carcpu le finpe seka'a le ko'u consider others received later in preparing the final varselclu bloti .i ra cu plana je cukselbarna je rijnyska version). .i ko'u ca punji ri le ko'u lektanxe .i pe'a le toknu solri cu jukpa le ko'u bunre skapi po'a .ije ko'u nitkla What we're providing: the first paragraph of the Akira le santa mu'i la'edi'u .i ko'u ca catlu fe le gapru mu'i story, as translated into English in two styles. The first le nu da ca zbasu lo linje pe loi danmo ge'u zi'e noi ragve is roughly identical to Jim's original English translation, le tsani .i da ca spoja sekai le ka carmi te gusni gi'e and is somewhat colloquial. The second is an attempt to lindi selrinka savru .i de ca masno bukfa'u .i la .akir structurally convey Jim's original Loglan (with necessary cu ponse lu lo vijyjatna ca nitcu le nu se sidju li'u .i corrections) in "Lojban-structured" English, the style in ko'u ca lafti le falnu vi le brife gi'e fankla ru .i ko'u which we typically print "literal translations" of Lojban. 77 cu pensi lu lo ca fasnu ba virnu se lisri fi mi .i le'i mi sentence-figurative. With toknu simsa solri (oven-like citpendo bazu nelci ri li'u sun), the figurative markers would not be necessary. Nora points out that tanru can be both restrictive and Now for Sylvia's back-translation of her effort, with non-restrictive, and prefers an explicit relative clause comments from Bob. Bob has left some questions open for instead of "le ko'u bunre skapi". The existing text could further suggestions and improvements. The analysis may be taken to imply that the sun cooked Akira's brown skin, show that translation is neither a simple, nor an but had no effect on the paler portions of his hide; this absolutely certain process (but it's a fun way to learn the would be a restrictive interpretation: "le ko'u skapi poi language). bunre" (it5's skin that is brown. The more plausible interpretation is "le ko'u skapi noi bunre" (it5's skin, la .akir. goi ko'u ca carcpu le finpe seka'a le ko'u which incidentally is brown). If nothing else, this varselclu bloti example shows how ambiguous tanru are, and yet how easily Akira (now called it5) now turn-pulls the fish (with they can be diambiguated when necessary. destination it5's air-filled boat). [Bob: I don't much like "turn-pulls"; if you don't know .ije ko'u nitkla le santa mu'i la'edi'u what it means from context and experience, you'd be and it5 under-comes to the umbrella/shade because of (last unlikely to guess. Lojban has a gismu "jendu" that could sentence). be useful. Also the need to use "seka'a" indicates that "turn-pulls" has obviously got the wrong place structure. Sylvia has translated "and" as a logical connective between To make my objection more obvious, here are two alternate two sentences. But given that a motivational "because" sentences with different objects than a fish: occurs later in the English, it should probably be reflected in the connective: Akira (now called it5) now turn-pulls the knob (with destination it5's air-filled boat). .isemu'ibo ko'u nitkla le santa Akira (now called it5) now turn-pulls the pier (with and-therefore-motivating it5 under-comes to the destination it5's air-filled boat). umbrella/shade. These make sense with implication of a totally different or even combine the two sentences: meaning of "turn-pulls". Perhaps muvdu would be a useful component of the tanru. .i le toknu simsa solri cu jukpa le ko'u bunre skapi .i ra cu plana je cukselbarna je rijnyska semu'i lenu ko'u nitkla le santa The-recent-it is plump and round-marked and silver-color. The oven-like sun cooks of it5's brown skin, motivating the event of it5 under-comes to the umbrella/shade. Since Akira has been assigned to ko'u, ra can only refer to the fish. We need to think about what we want skari to Since the original for the last sumti was "canopy", a mean. Does "ti skari" mean "This is a color", or "This is more exact tanru might be selctino drudi "shadowing-roof". colored", or are these the same thing? A safe way would be Other possibilities? "Under-comes" is a bit more limited the tanru "skari rijnysi'a" "colorishly silver-like". Any than Jim's original "recur-self-safe-puts (himself)" - the other ideas? The original had "delicious" as another recurrence and the safety are lost. Can someone do better? property of the fish, but this should be easy for someone to fix. .i ko'u ca catlu fe le gapru mu'i le nu da ca zbasu lo linje pe loi danmo ge'u zi'e noi ragve le tsani .i ko'u ca punji ri le ko'u lektanxe It5 now looks at the up-thing because of something1 now It5 now puts last-it at it5's cold-box. makes a line related to smoke which-incidentally is across the sky. The English uses 'it' here, but for clarity, I would use le finpe instead of ri. Akira probably put it inside, not The fe is superfluous, as is the ge'u; the latter is just "at" the bold-box, but this may be picky. You could reasonable though, in that elidable terminators are welcome add the word nenri to the end to be clear (at the cold-box when they help break up a complex structure. insides), or use lekseltanxe, putting the fish at the cold We're in a narrative. The ca on the bridi therefore box-contents. means that story-time is the same as the previous sentence. Thus Sylvia's sentence translates as "It5 at the same time .i pe'a le toknu solri cu jukpa le ko'u bunre skapi po'a looks at ... which is just then making a line ..." Figuratively (the oven sun is a cooker of it5's brown skin Looking at the original, we can see that a bit is ) end figurative. missing: The whole sentence might be figurative, or maybe just the But he suddenly looked up, for something was making a first tanru; I would take sunburn as a result of sun- line of smoke through the sky, and suddenly exploded cooking skin. Sylvia has marked it correctly for a whole- with a flash and a clap of thunder. 78 Short-time he-5 suddenly up-looks. The "ca" again indicates simultaneity with the previous Because-motivationally something makes a line which-is sentence. Jim's original: "Something down-float-flies smoke through the sky, and suddenly explodes (which- using-tool a fall-cloth." would be: is?) shock-bright and a thunder/lightning-producer. .i de nitflevoi sepi'o lo falbu'u "Suddenly" is suksa. Jim's original used "zi" (implying Nora suggests "cloth-brake-fall": "bazi") where Sylvia used "ca". But one other things is .i de bukyjabre farlu. wrong. Akira looks up because of the moving across the sky .i la .akir cu ponse lu lo vijyjatna ca nitcu le nu se and the explosion - indeed, it was probably the latter that sidju li'u caught his attention, and he later noticed the line of Akira now thinks "an airplane-captain now needs an event of smoke and inferred the motion from this. Sylvia has exiled being assisted". the explosion to a separate sentence that has no causal connection to the looking up, and Akira is looking up Sylvia has Akira making a bolder guess as to what was because of the smoke-line. What she has said makes perfect flying before it exploded. It may not have been an sense, but is not what the original said. airplane, and indeed, since this is a science fiction My attempt (making minimal effort - I could probably do story, I suspect it isn't (I didn't check). Jim's original better, but this is your project): tanru was "flyer-driver" or volsazri". Again, I think the "ca" is unnecessary, and more Lojbanically unspecified in .izibo suksa fa lenu ko'u gapcatlu favor of "cu". Need for assistance is a rather unintense .imu'ibo da zbasu lo danmo linji noi ragve le tsani ku'o need for rescue, though technically correct (the faller gi'ebabo spoja sekai le ka carmi te gusni gi'e lindi needs assistance in "continuing to live"). Perhaps someone savru can come up with a better expression (consider "ckape"). Shortly, is sudden, the event of it5's above-looking. This is because of somethingx making a smoke-line, which .i ko'u ca lafti le falnu vi le brife gi'e fankla ru is across the sky, and-then exploding characterized by It5 now lifts the sail at the location of the breeze and intense-illumination and lightning-noise. sail goes to earlier-it. Note my non-English phrasing of the first part, due to Another "ca" - a lot happening simultaneously in Sylvia's "sudden" not normally being an English predicate. Note story. "de" or "le farlu" are clearer than the vague "ru", also that "ku'o" that is required to terminate the noi which could refer to a lot of things at this point. relative clause. Otherwise, the translation would read: Sylvia has misunderstood Jim's description of the means of propoulsion. It is a "kite-sail" which Akira "throws This is because of the event of somethingx making a into the wind". This sounds rather exotic, while Sylvia's smoke-line, which crosses the sky and-then explodes boat sounds like an ordinary sailboat. characterized by intense-illumination and lightning- How about something like: noise. .i ko'u renro le volfalnu seri'a le nu kavbu le The smoke-line did not explode. ca'erbi'e .i fankla le farlu It5 throws the flying-sail causing the state of catching the pusher-breeze. Sail-goer to the faller. .i da ca spoja sekai le ka carmi te gusni gi'e lindi selrinka savru .i ko'u cu pensi lu lo ca fasnu ba virnu se lisri fi mi .i Something1 now explodes (with intense illumination) and le'i mi citpendo bazu nelci ri li'u lightning-caused type of noise. it5 thinks "a now-event is going to be a brave story- subject told by me. The set of my young-friends will for In Sylvia's version, the sentences should probably be a long time be fond of last-it." joined with ".ije" to be logically correct, since "da" is by definition a logical variable. Pragmatically, what she This is vaguer than Jim's original: "a now event" vs. "the did was OK, though - in non-logical argument, a listener event-just-mentioned", which, following Akira's thoughts as would understand that the "da" in both sentences is the quoted, is specifically "the rescue". If you take the same. The "ca" says that this is happening at the same quotes as literal thoughts, "la'edi'u" is "the event-just- time as the previous sentence (i.e. when something makes a mentioned". line). It is better left tenseless (the English "and now I also have a little trouble with "a brave story- ..." would typically equate to "and then immediately"). subject", though Jim did something similar to convey "bold story"; if the story-subject is bold, it is probably a person - yet the story is described as about the rescue, .i de ca masno bukfa'u not about either the rescuer or rescuee, either of whom Something2 now slowly cloth-falls. could have been brave. I suspect "banli" is better than "virnu" for bold, or at least a compound of the two "vribanli", and modifying "lisri" instead of "se lisri". 79 "bazu" is not "will for a long time", but rather "will a careful. Other causal choices may be no better, and you long time later". I think Sylvia wanted "baze'u" "in the may want a non-causal to express Jim's intent by the future during a long interval". colloquial English. Sets do not normally perform actions or have feelings * Be careful of your 'somethings' in this passage; like "being fond of". Sylvia wants a mass "lei" instead of unfortunately Jim didn't. In this particular case, for "le'i" example, either 1) use a different 'something' than The final "ri" unfortunately refers back to the set of "something1" or "something2", 2) use the UI cmavo that friends, giving us a set noted for self-love (truly unusual cancels anaphora (but this cancels the it5 assignment too), in a set). Jim's original assigned the rescue to a pro- 3) correctly use .ije between sentences using the same sumti somewhere between "di" or "ko'i" (something3/it3), referent of something, 4) or assign a specific "it" instead but we are in someone's thoughts here, and I suspect of a "something". anaphora are not in good order. (It also is unclear whether the friends are fond of the rescue or the story Finally, here is Bob's quarterly in-Lojban essay. As about the rescue in Jim's original.) "The rescue" or "the before, no translation is given; this is the 'prize' that story" should be used here. is only for people who dare. (We'll look at and respond to any questions, responses, or translation attempts that you Sylvia's effort was remarkable, given the complexity of send us, but you have to try first.) Bob is writing the text and that she had little or no help; she did use directly in Lojban, and trying to 'think in the language' the old parser to check her work. We are not expecting the rather than express ideas in English and translate them. average Lojbanist to do this well on a first attempt. The topic this issue turned out to be more timely than Bob Translation is non-trivial as an exercise in language use. thought it would be when he came up with the idea for it Especially when you try to capture the style and sentence several months ago. Enjoy! complexity of the original, as Sylvia did. Jim did not use trivial grammar in his story. When you first write in ni'oni'o pucaki le prula'i ke xamoi masti ku mi rirci Lojban, give it your best shot, but expect to make lots of zgana ja pensi le cmene po'u la. ku,EIT. .i mi ca cfari errors. You'll find yourself learning quickly. lenu pensi lo sidbo noi binxo co mutce vajni roma'a .ije mi pensi le sidbo noi srana la djim. braun. noi mi sinma Now, feel free to comment on this text, or even use the .ije mi ca djica lenu ci'arsku le sidbo fu la me <<lu ju'i pieces Sylvia and Bob came up with along with your own lobypli li'u>> .i le ki'a sidbo vau ideas to come up with your own version of the paragraph. ni'o lu'e le sidbo ca glico jenai lojbo valsi Useful comments and a revised translation may appear in .isemu'ibo mi troci co finti lo jbovla .i .ei le jbovla next issue. Then brave souls can try all or part of the terfanva "zoi .gic. hero .gic." goi ko'a .i kiku mi ca following, which is the second paragraph of the story. The ciska first version again is colloquial English, and the second, ni'o pu pamoi fa lezu'o mi sisku le gicyvla smuni du'o le Lojbanized-English, back-translated from the original old- glico vlamarcku .i mi binxo lo jimpe be leza'i le valsi cu Loglan. so'imei smuni .i mi ca troci lenu cusku loi smuni gi'e fanva ri la lojban. .ibabo mi ka'e casnu leka la djim. The parachute was floating in the sea, but the pilot was braun me ko'a pe'i .i de'e velsku lei smuni nowhere to be seen. Akira thought, "Maybe he drowned". He pulled the parachute into the stern of the boat, and he discovered a harness containing a radio and a knife and a flashlight. But nobody was wearing it. He called, "Hey, pilot! Where are you? Say something, because I don't see you." But nobody answered. New paragraph medium-time-offset the fall-cloth floats to the sea. and in contrast the flyer-driver is-not-seen. Said by it5 (Akira): mild-belief (perhaps) it2 past water- breathed. Said by narrator: it5 inside-pulls the fall- cloth to the behind-part of the boat. It5 discovers something1 which incidentally-is-a-joined-garment, one which is joined to a radio and a knife and a hand-light- device. In contrast, no something2 garment-uses something1 (the harness). Said by it5: "Attention the flyer-driver: At where? (Imperative) Cry out and there- fore *motivationally I see you." Said by narrator: In contrast, no *something1 respondingly-talks. Notes on some errors in Jim's original: * The motivational causal seems like the wrong choice of causal. Crying out won't motivate the seeing. But be 80 ni'o pamai le me ko'a mormuprai goi ko'e selranmi gi'e .i le to'e barda cribe po'u la ve'arib. goi ko'i vau tsali je virnu ke cevni joi nanmu .i remai le gicvla cu The opposite-of-large-bear which-is called Child-Bear is smuni roda poi nanmu gi'e tarti le simsa be ko'e assigned as it3. (to .iku'i la xeros. cu ba'e ninmu selranmi fi loi xelso gi'e na'e me ko'a .i le glibau cu ponse le drata je kampu "Once upon a time" the three bears lived in a house by the bo krasi valsi poi smuni le ba'e ninmu poi me ko'a .i la trees, the biggest bear, Papa Bear, who we'll call #1, the lojban. ka'e pilno lo valsi pamei poi smuni le sidbo secau medium-size bear, Mama Bear, who we'll call #2, and the .o'a leka smuni le selcinse toi) smallest bear, Baby Bear, who we'll call #3. ni'o cimai .uinai le gicyvla cu smuni so'i drata .i smuni roda poi vajni prenu to ji'a cficku rajraipre toi zi'a poi tatmo'a zanmupli prenu zi'a .oi poi nujdja klesi ni'o ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo citka kabri .i le'i smuni cu mutce vrici (New Para.) Each of the bears possesses one of the eating ni'o do smuni ma fau lenu do skicu de sepi'o le gicyvla cups. po'u ko'a .i cai na'eka'e jimpe le gicyvla .i mi ba'e na .i le ko'a kabri cu je'a barda xusra le nu la djim braun. It1's cup is indeed-large. cu nujdja zo'o .i le ko'e kabri cu no'e barda ni'o de'u mupli leka lezu'o fanva lo valsi cu mutce nandu It2's cup is not-really-large. .i mi cuxna pa smuni be le gicyvla be'o poi seldji .i mi .i le ko'i kabri cu to'e barda pilno le jbovla poi velsku le selcu'a smuni It3's cup is opposite-of-large. ni'o mi jinvi lenu le vajni sidbo po'e ko'a cu si'o lo prenu cu pijvri tarti .i mi jinvi lenu la djim. braun pu Each bear has a bowl. #1's bowl is large. #2's bowl is mupli leka pijvritai .iki'ubo tu'e la djim. braun. zivle medium-size. #3's bowl is tiny. piso'e leri nunjmive lepu'u finti .i ri ki'u le bangu ka rutni ku to'e tersinma le certu noi la djim. braun. cu ni'o ji'a ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo zutse stizu (New nitcu joi djica lenu ke'a sarji tu'u Para.) In addition, each of the bears possesses one of the ni'o ji'a le ca natmi gunma sonci cu mupli leka sitter-chairs. pijvritai kei fau le jamna be le rakyjecta .i .a'o ma'a .i le ko'a stizu cu je'a barda selctu fi loika pijvritai gi'e morfu'i tatri bacapiso'iroi It1's chair is indeed-large. le vo'a nunji'e .i le ko'e stizu cu no'e barda It2's chair is not-really-large. .i le ko'i stizu cu to'e barda It3's chair is opposite-of-large. Translations of le lojbo se ciska Also, each bear has a sitting chair. #1's chair is large. la pexykerf. .e le ci cribe vau #2's chair is medium-size. #3's chair is tiny. The one named Yellow-hair, and the three bears. ni'o ji'a ro le cribe cu ponse pa lo sipna ckana (New Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Para.) In addition, each of the bears possesses one of the sleeper-beds. .i le ko'a ckana cu je'a barda ni'oni'o fu'e ka'u le ci prenu cribe cu se zdani It1's bed is indeed-large. tu'i le tricu .i le ko'e ckana cu no'e barda (New topic) (Open indicator scope) I know culturally: The It2's bed is not-really-large. three person-bears are nested (in a house), associated- .i le ko'i ckana cu to'e barda with-site the trees. It3's bed is opposite-of-large. .i le je'a barda cribe po'u la pafrib. goi ko'a vau The indeed-large-bear which-is called Father-Bear is Also, each bear has a sleeping bed. #1's bed is large. assigned as it1. #2's bed is medium-size. #3's bed is tiny. .i le no'e barda cribe po'u la mamrib. goi ko'e vau The not-really-large-bear which-is called Mother-Bear is assigned as it2. ni'o le cribe cu cikna (New para.) The bears are awake gi'e tisna le kabri lei cilmo gurni and fill the cups with (some-of)-the wet-grain 81 mu'i le nu citka le pamoi sanmi motivatedly-because the-event-of eating the first-meal. .i ku'i lei gurni cu dukse ni'o ko'u zgana le ci stizu However, the grain is excess (New Para.) It5 observes the three chairs. le ka glare kei le pu'u citka kei .i ko'u tatpi in the property of warm-ness by-standard the-process-of- It5 is tired eating semu'i le nu jdice le nu zutse seki'u le zu'o le cribe cu cadzu motivating-therefore the-event-of-deciding-the-event-of- by-reason-therefore the-activity-of the bears walking. sitting. .i melbi djedi .i pamai ko'u troci zutse le ko'a stizu Beautiful day. First, it5 tryingly-sits-on it1's chair. .i ku'i ri dukse je'a galtu The bears awaken, and fill their cups with porridge in But it (the chair) is-excessively-indeed-high. order to eat breakfast. But the porridge is too hot to .i remai ko'u troci zutse le ko'e stizu eat, justifying the bears going for a walk. It's a nice Second, it5 tryingly-sits-on it2's chair. day. .i ku'i ri dukse to'e galtu But it (the chair) is-excessively-opposite-of-high. .i cimai ko'u troci zutse le ko'i stizu ni'o le verba po'u la pexykerf. goi ko'u Third, it5 tryingly-sits-on it3's chair. (New para.) The child, who-is called Yellow-hair, assigned .i ri prane le ka galtu to it5 It (the chair) is-perfect in the property of highness. cu catlu le nenri be le zdani semu'i le zu'o ko'u zutse le ko'i stizu looks at the inside of the house. motivating-therefore the activity of it5 sitting-on it3's .i no prenu cu nenri chair No person is inside. seri'a le nu ri porpi semu'i le nu ko'u nenri cadzu causing-therefore the-event-of it (the chair) breaks. therefore-motivating the-event-of it5 inside-walking. #5 observes the three chairs. #5 is tired, and she The child, Goldilocks, who we'll call #5, looks into the therefore decides to sit. First #5 tries to sit on #1's house. Nobody is there, so #5 walks inside. chair, but it is too high. Second, #5 tries to sit on #2's chair, but it is too low. Third, #5 tries to sit on #3's chair. It's perfect in height, and she therefore sits in ni'o ko'u zgana le ci kabri #3's chair, causing it to break. (New Para.) It5 observes the three cups. .i ko'u xagji It5 is hungry ni'o ko'u zgana le ci ckana semu'i le nu jdice le nu citka lei gurni (New Para.) It5 observes the three beds. motivating-therefore the-event-of-deciding-the-event-of- .i ko'u mu'erta'i eating-of-the-grain. It5 is much-tired .i pamai ko'u troci citka lei ko'a gurni semu'i le nu jdice le nu sipna vreta First, it5 tryingly-eats of-it1's grain. motivating-therefore the-event-of-deciding-the-event-of- .i ku'i ri dukse je'a glare sleepily-resting-on. But it (the grain) is-excessively-indeed-warm. .i pamai ko'u troci vreta le ko'a ckana .i remai ko'u troci citka lei ko'e gurni First, it5 tryingly-rests-on it1's bed. Second, it5 tryingly-eats of-it2's grain. .i ku'i ri dukse je'a jdari .i ku'i ri dukse to'e glare But it (the bed) is-excessively-indeed-firm. But it (the grain) is-excessively-opposite-of-warm. .i remai ko'u troci vreta le ko'e ckana .i cimai ko'u troci citka lei ko'i gurni Second, it5 tryingly-rests-on it2's bed. Third, it5 tryingly-eats of-it3's grain. .i ri prane le ka glare It (the grain) is-perfect in the property of warmness. semu'i le zu'o ko'u citka pi ro lei ko'i gurni motivating-therefore the activity of it5 eating all-of it3's grain. #5 observes the three cups. #5 is hungry, and she therefore decides to eat the porridge. First #5 tries to eat #1's porridge, but it is too hot. Second, #5 tries to eat #2's porridge, but it is too cold. Third, #5 tries to eat #3's porridge. It's perfectly warm, and she therefore eats all of the porridge. 82 .i ku'i ri dukse to'e jdari But it (the bed) is-excessively-opposite-of-firm. #1 looks at its chair, and says in its loud voice, .i cimai ko'u troci vreta le ko'i ckana "Something sat in my chair." Third, it5 tryingly-rests-on it3's bed. .i ri prane le ka jdari It (the bed) is-perfect in the property of firmness. .i ko'e catlu le vo'a stizu semu'i le zu'o ko'u sipna It2 looks at its chair motivating-therefore the-activity-of it5 sleeping. gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa and then expresses using-tool it2's not-really-loud-voice #5 observes the three beds. #5 is very tired, and she lu dexire pu zutse le mi stizu li'u therefore decides to rest. First #5 tries to rest on #1's "Something22 sat-on my chair." bed, but it is too hard. Second, #5 tries to rest on #2's bed, but it is too soft. Third, #5 tries to rest on #3's #2 looks at its chair, and says in its medium voice, bed. It's perfectly firm, and she therefore sleeps. "Something sat in my chair." ni'o le cribe cu xruti gi'e djica lei gurni .i ko'i catlu le vo'a stizu (New para.) The bears return and want the grain. It3 looks at its chair gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa The bears return and want their porridge. and then expresses using-tool it3's opposite-of-loud-voice lu dixire pu ba'e daspo zutse le mi stizu li'u "Something33 DESTRUCTIVELY sat-on my chair." ni'o ko'a catlu le vo'a kabri (New para.) It1 looks at its cup #3 looks at its chair, and says in its soft voice, gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa "Something destructively sat in my chair." and then expresses using-tool it1's indeed-loud-voice lu da pu citka piso'u lei mi gurni li'u "Something1 ate a-little-of my grain." .i ko'a catlu le vo'a ckana It1 looks at its bed #1 looks at its bowl, and says in its loud voice, gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa "Something ate some of my porridge." and then expresses using-tool it1's indeed-loud-voice lu daxici pu sipna vreta le mi ckana li'u "Something13 sleepily-rested-on my bed." .i ko'e catlu le vo'a kabri It2 looks at its cup #1 looks at its bed, and says in its loud voice, "Something gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa slept in my bed." and then expresses using-tool it2's not-really-loud-voice lu de pu citka piso'u lei mi gurni li'u "Something2 ate a-little-of my grain." .i ko'e catlu le vo'a ckana It2 looks at its bed #2 looks at its bowl, and says in its medium voice, gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'e no'e cladu voksa "Something ate some of my porridge." and then expresses using-tool it2's not-really-loud-voice lu dexici pu sipna vreta le mi ckana li'u "Something23 sleepily-rested-on my bed." .i ko'i catlu le vo'a kabri It3 looks at its cup #2 looks at its bed, and says in its medium voice, gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa "Something slept in my bed." and then expresses using-tool it3's opposite-of-loud-voice lu di pu citka pi ba'e ro lei mi gurni li'u" Something3 ate ALL of my grain." .i ko'i catlu le vo'a ckana It3 looks at its bed #3 looks at its bowl, and says in its soft-voice, gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'i to'e cladu voksa "Something ate ALL of my porridge." and then expresses using-tool it3's opposite-of-loud-voice lu dixici pu je ba'e ca sipna vreta le mi ckana li'u .i ko'a catlu le vo'a stizu "Something13 was-and-IS_NOW sleepily-resting-on my bed." It1 looks at its chair gi'ebabo cusku sepi'o le ko'a je'a cladu voksa #3 looks at its bed, and says in its soft voice, "Something and then expresses using-tool it1's indeed-loud-voice slept and IS SLEEPING in my bed." lu daxire pu zutse le mi stizu li'u "Something12 sat-on my chair." 83 ni'o ri'a la'edi'u ko'u cikna sleepingly-rests-on attempts (New para.) Because of this (it3's looking and saying), it5 is awake. but with the place structure of "vreta", the final element .i le cribe cu catlu ko'u of the tanru, determining the interpretation of the The bears look at it5 trailing sumti (the bed). The essential claim is that of seki'u le nu ko'u bajra cliva trying, not of sleepingly-resting, which is the norm with which-reason-justifies the-event-of it5 runningly-leaving. intentional statements. Using "co" preserves "troci" as .i le cribe noroi ku'a ba viska ko'u the essential claim, while allowing access to the trailing The bears never-intersection-later see it5. place of "vreta": This causes #5 to be awake. The bears look at #5, troci co sipna vreta le ckana justifying #5's hasty departure. The bears never again see "tries to sleepingly-rest-on the bed" #5. This change was not made in the story because the vaguer fa'o tanru is sufficiently understandable given the context, and End of text. we're reluctant to make unnecessary changes in an The End. translator's work. Besides, it gave the opportunity for this mini-lesson in "co". (There is a more clear example of "co" with "troci" given in the next commentary.) The preceding was among other things an exercise in causal constructions. It is worthwhile to examine closely when each causal was used, and how it affected the A Letter From Sylvia Rutiser to T. Peter Park translation. Some of the choices were marginal (and some indeed were changed during editing of this text). This letter was written about a month before Sylvia's Note the insertion of "vreta" with "sipna" in those attempt at the Carter paragraph. The difference is plain: sentences that refer to the bed being slept on. You don't she makes a lot of minor word choice errors because she had need a bed to sleep, but you do need to be upon something only just started studying the cmavo. to rest-on it. Place structures are important in Lojban. (Without the "vreta", sentences translate like "it5 di'o zoi .kuot. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax, VA 22031 .kuot. tryingly-sleeps in-some-way-associated-with it2's bed" At the locus of (non-Lojban) "2904 Beau Lane", which gets the point across, but none to exactly. In pragmatic situations, of course, this version would be ["tu'i" is the correct choice, not "di'o", for location on correctly understood given the context, (which is why a letter. Also, to be more correct, "la'e" should be used guessing at place structures usually works). on the "zoi" quote (giving the thing indicated by the One further change would probably be justified, but was address instead of the address), or optionally the new non- not made. Goldilocks, as the story progresses "troci Lojban-name marker "la'o", which has the same grammar as broda" "tryingly-does-something" in John's text. This "zoi" - this then treats the address as the name of a becomes especially cumbersome with the "sipna vreta" location. construction, because "troci sipna vreta" groups in pairs from the left, giving "tryingly-sleeps kind-of-rests", losing some symmetry by dividing the "sipna vreta" tanru. de'i la'eli so pi'e pa vau coi doi ti.pitr. To right-group, you need "ke" or "bo": associated-with-date the-referent-of the number 9/1 (9 January), greetings O T.Peter. troci ke sipna vreta Here, the "la'e" isn't needed, since a date is merely a or string of numbers. The "coi" greetings here attaches to troci sipna bo vreta the "vau" on the previous line, since no ".i" was used between the two lines. which identically mean: "tryingly sleepily-rests" .i la bab. pu cpedu lenu mi cu spuda le do xatra po le xriso nunsalci The problem is more easily solved using "co", a word The one named Bob requested the event of my responding to especially valuable with tanru involving "troci", "djica", your letter which is possessed by the Christ celebration. and certain other words that link actions/events with "pe" instead of "po" would be more correct, giving the intentions ('intentional verbs' in English). Inserting letter "loosely associated with" the celebration. "co" inverts the tanru, making it translate much more clearly into English (and probably causing increased clarity in the Lojban as well). This gives the equivalent .i loi snime poi puza farlu ku'o ca runme of: A mass of snow which a-while-ago fell, now melts. sipna vreta troci 84 I would have used "lei", since she has a specific mass of Let's break this sentence up so it is more understandable: snow in mind (the stuff on the ground here), but this isn't wrong, and indeed is a good usage of tense. ni'o (New paragragh) la bab. puzi te benji .i le solri cu gusni ga'a mi le nuzba po'u The sun is an illuminator, observed by me. (I can see the lenu la .atlstan. goi ko'a sun shining.) pu klama la iutas. fu leko'a karce la bab. puzi te benji le nuzba po'u lenu la .atlstan. goi mu'i lenu ko'a pu klama la iutas. fu leko'a karce mu'i lenu ko'a ko'a djica djica lenu tavla le lobypli sedi'o la iutas. lenu tavla The one named Bob just was the origin of transmission of le lobypli the news which is the-event-of Athelstan (it1) went to Utah sedi'o la iutas. via mode his car motivated by the-event-of he desires the- The one named Bob just was the origin of transmission event-of-talking to the Lojban-users at-specific-locus- of the news which is Utah. the-event-of Athelstan (it1) went In colloquial English, this is still complicated: to Utah Bob just told me the news that Athelstan went to Utah in via mode his car his car in order to talk to some Utah Lojbanists. motivated by the-event-of and the sentence could have been simplified a bit to match he desires that colloquial translation. the-event-of-talking to the Lojban-users at-specific-locus-Utah. The place structure of news includes a source, so the outer-most selbri using "benji" wasn't needed (I'll demonstrate in a moment). It also wasn't the main claim of the sentence, which was the news itself. In addition, "te benji" was a bad choice for Bob: "benji" is a transmission of which this 3rd place is the origin. In this context, Bob is the first place of "benji" - the transmit origin was somewhere in the house in Fairfax VA. A final error is in the places of "nuzba". Sylvia here has equated the news (le nuzba) with the event, which is really "le se nuzba", the 2nd place of "nuzba". Here's Bob's version: la bab. puzi te nuzba lenu la. .atlstan. pu klama la .iutas. fu lera karce semu'i lenu tavla le lobypli pe la .iutas. Bob was-just a-source-of-news of-the-event Athelstan went to-Utah in-his-car, motivated-to the-event-of talking-to the Lojban-users of Utah. Even this non-colloquial translation is only slightly longer than the colloquial English. ni'o mi ca troci lenu cilre lo'i cmavo (New para.) I now try the event of learning the set of cmavo. Using the "co" construction mentioned in "The Three Bears" commentary, this would be: mi ca troci co cilre lo'i cmavo I am now a tryer of-type learner-of-the-set-of-cmavo. 85 Either version is acceptable, and I won't state a preference. Nora prefers Sylvia's version, since it explicitly uses the place structure of "troci", and she ({<[({<de'e [fi (la maiky'elsym.)]> CU <xatra [(de'i {li prefers to avoid tanru in favor of place structure usage <[pa bi ki'o fei ki'o so no] BOI>}) VAU]>} whenever it is not excessively burdensome (and "lenu" is {i <coi [do'o (pe {zi KU} GEhU)] DOhU>} POhO) not much longer than "co"). (i e'a) ({selmi'a minseldunda} vau)] [i u'u se'i] [ri CU (mleca {<[da (poi {<mi ke'a> CU djica} ku'o)] [ri'a (le {mi <[ba zi] [mextutra ***ze'i*** .i .e'o ko fraxu mi leni cizra gerna po mu'i la'edi'u nunli'u]>} KU)]> VAU})]> (Petition!) Forgive me for the-amount-of bizarre-grammar The ze'i was in Michael's original, was not grammatical nor closely-associated-with motivationally because of the particularly necessary, so I deleted it. referent-of-the-last-sentence (the trying to learn). i POhO} Colloquially: Please forgive me for the bizarre grammar that results from ni'o {<[({mi do} CU {ckire <[(le {selbei <judri [be ({la this (trying to learn). .atlstan.} "po" should be "pe"; we usually use "po" for physical {no'u <[(ca ze'e) vu ki'a] KU> GEhU}) BEhO]>} KU) ] possession or a very close association. "pe" indicates a VAU>}) much looser association used with most phrases. Also, I i ({mi ri} {ba <xagdicra la'a [(pu {le <mi vuzyseltei> KU}) doubt that the bizarre grammar was really motivated by the VAU]>})] learning. The learning might be a reason, though: i POhO> leni cizra gerna pe ki'u la'edi'u ni'o <[({di'e CU <[cnino (ke {mitfa'e lerpoi} KEhE)] VAU>} i {<lu [ua ({vibjbi vau} FAhO)] li'u> CU <zmadu [({lei mordrata KU} ni'o .e'o ledo tcima cu pluka {le <ka [(plikakne {su'o mei zo'o pe'i cu'i}) VAU] (New para.) (Petition!) Your weather is pleasing. KEI> KU}) VAU]>}) ".a'o" (hope) seems like the more likely attitude, since (i to'u a'o) ({<sarji balvi> snada} {vau <mi'e maikl. there is little T.Peter can do about his weather. DOhU>})] FAhO>}) .i .e'o ko kanro The following is Michael's intended translation: (Petition!) Be healthy. This is from Michael Helsem a letter dated 18 November 1990. Hi y'all. Here's some more money. Unfortunately coi la silvian it's less than I would prefer on account of my forthcoming (Greetings, Sylvia.) trip to Mexico. Thanks for sending Athelstan's address - She had not yet learned "mi'e", and greeted instead of he's not still gone is he? I'll get in touch with him parted. A 'correct' letter closer conveying her intent is maybe before I go... Here's a new palindrome: "Eureka! "co'omi'e" (Partings!, I am ...) vagina-near!" - which is a bit more useful than the others of the pattern ...(ahem). Anyway, hope the others come through. Michael. A letter from Michael Helsem Of course, intentions are only half the story. Here's how Bob reads the letter: Michael uses much more complex (and bizarre at times) grammar than Sylvia. He asked for a letter of his to be run through the parser, showing the result. I chose a de'e fi la maiky'elsym. xatra de'i li pabiki'ofeiki'osono short one that could be easily cleaned up. (The old parser ({<[({<de'e [fi (la maiky'elsym.)]> CU <xatra [(de'i {li does not properly handle attitudinals and tense compounds, <[pa bi ki'o fei ki'o so no] BOI>}) VAU]>} and some newer cmavo, which Michael uses a lot of; The soon utterances, from Michael Helsem, are-a-letter therefore I have to manually add the deleted text to the dated 18,00B,090 (18 million odd in some base greater than parse output). 12). "ki'o" is a 'real number', normally meaning 'thousands' de'e fi la maiky'elsym. xatra de'i li pabiki'ofeiki'osono (depending on the normal place for inserting commas), used .i coi do'opezi .i .e'a selmi'a minseldunda vau .i in writing large numbers. It can also replace 3 zeroes in .u'use'i ri mleca da poi mi ke'a djica ku'o ri'a lemi bazi large numbers such as business reports. Michael wanted mextutra nunli'u .i ni'o mi do ckire le selbei judri be la "pi'e", the non-decimal separator, giving "18/B/90", where .atlstan. no'u caze'evu ki'a .i mi ri ba xagdicra la'a pu "B" is the non-base-10 digit for 11 (November). lemi vuzyseltei .i ni'o di'e cnino ke mitfa'e lerpoi .i lu .ua vibjbi vau li'u zmadu lei mordrata leka plikakne su'omei zo'ope'icu'i .i to'u .a'o sarji balvi snada vau .i coi do'opezi mi'e maikl. {i <coi [do'o (pe {zi KU} GEhU)] DOhU>} POhO) 86 Greetings, you and others who are a short-distance-in-time .i .u'use'i ri mleca da poi mi ke'a djica ku'o ri'a lemi away from ... bazi mextutra nunli'u "zi" is used only for distances in time (now); in the [i u'u se'i] [ri CU (mleca {<[da (poi {<mi ke'a> CU djica} past it could be either time or space distance, but this ku'o)] [ri'a (le {mi <[ba zi] [mextutra ***ze'i*** changed when we did the final tense grammar. This isn't nunli'u]>} KU)]> VAU})]> necessarily clear in the published cmavo list, and we will (I regret - self oriented!) The-last-sumti-it (you-and- be clarifying it in later versions (see also the sheet of others-near-in-time) is less than something1 which I, the changes enclosed with this issue). "vi" is the something, want, less-than because my soon-future Mexican corresponding space-time distance, but I would prefer territory (*short-time-interval) event-of-travelling. "ve'i" (lexeme VEhA) which indicates an interval (you and I would tend to take self-oriented-regret as an apology others in the space around ... [you implied]) to himself, but this is to be determined by usage. It's clear from the translation that the "ri" was intended to refer to the money-gift, but there is no sumti .i .e'a selmi'a minseldunda vau in that sentence to refer to. "le jdini" or "le selyle'i" (i e'a) ({selmi'a minseldunda} vau)] would have served. Then, of course, Michael is using a (Permission!) (Observative) Added-things type-of commander- comparison, and should therefore have some reference to gifts. amounts, so make that "le ni jdini" or "le ni selyle'i". No idea about what the attitudinal is, or for that (Two parallel usages for the comparatives seem to be matter, what the sentence means. Given the translation, I possible, and equally valid: The amount-of-A is-less-than might conclude a typo for dinseldunda (money-gifts). This the amount-of-B in-property-C, by-amount-D, and A is-less- suggests that the money he sent was a donation rather than than B in-the-amount-of-C, by-amount-D.) a voluntary balance contribution (the distinction is Michael seems to like SOV (subject-object-verb important), which is not reflected in the English. (We constructions); very non-English but perfectly acceptable. assumed a balance contribution). "selpleji" (something- The something1 must be an amount of some kind. paid) would be clearer for a balance contribution, or The "ku'o" was excellent, and grammatically vital. depending on how you philosophically look at it, something Without it, the "because" would have been attached to the involving "se fatri pagbu" (distributed-part = share) relative clause bridi, involving "djica"; this comes out like "It's less than the amount I want because of my trip.", as compared to his correct "It's less than the amount I want, because of my trip." It's in samples like these that we see how complex language is in general, and thus realize that even a simple language like Lojban requires thought in order to use it. I have no idea what the intent of the "ze'i" was, but any tense inflections must be before the beginning of the selbri, not in the middle of it. Note that "litru" is any self-movement via a route with no origin or destination implied; it does not mean "travel" in the norma English sense. Normally, you will use "klama" if you are specifically going somewhere. In this case, however, it worked well, since the tanru modifier, Mexican-territory, is a reasonable brief description of the route involved in his intended trip. .i i POhO} And... It seems clear here that Michael thought you need an ".i" before a "ni'o". You don't, and the parser thinks he had a partial sentence with no body. ni'o mi do ckire le selbei judri be la .atlstan. no'u caze'evu ki'a ni'o {<[({mi do} CU {ckire <[(le {selbei <judri [be ({la .atlstan.} {no'u <[(ca ze'e) vu ki'a] KU> GEhU}) BEhO]>} KU) ] VAU>}) (New para.) I to-you am-grateful for-the transferred address of Athelstan, who incidentally is identical to now- 87 for-some-unspecified-time-interval far-from (Please .i mi ri ba xagdicra la'a pu lemi vuzyseltei clarify, I'm confused!) i ({mi ri} {ba <xagdicra la'a [(pu {le <mi vuzyseltei> KU}) A very strange SOV construction, with two sumti before VAU]>})] and one after, not too common in any language that I know I, Athelstan, good-interrupt (Probably!) before my of. The relative phrase is perfectly grammatical and even yonder_far-time-interval. vaguely understandable (I'd have guessed his intent without "ri" is correctly Athelstan, though it might not be if a translation), but the semantics are all wrong. Michael some of my various alternates had been used. wanted "ne" instead of "no'u", for a phrasal construction, I have no idea what his tanru means, and can't even guess and "ma" instead of "ki'a" to ask the question: how to correct it, except that I strongly suspect that he wanted "zabna" (positive connotation) instead of "xamgu" la .atlstan. ne caze'evi ma (good for ...) For his English, I would use "benji", or Athelstan, who incidentally is associated with during-an- actually "troci co benji", since he clearly isn't sure he unspecified-interval-at where actually can get in touch with Athelstan before he leaves. The final tanru is understandable after I see his This could still be asking when as well as where, since English, not before. Why doesn't he use the plain there is a time and a location tag in the sumti tcita equivalent of his English: "pu lenu mi cliva". (I repeat "caze'evi", so even more clear would be: my puzi remark about misintepreting strange usages. The burden of communicating, especially in a letter where there la .atlstan. noi caze'e zvati ma is no possibility of immediate questioning feedback, is Athelstan, who incidentally during-an-unspecified- TOTALLY on the speaker/writer.) interval is-at where None of these is quite the same as his English translation, .i which was: i POhO> Thanks for sending Athelstan's address - he's not still And ... gone is he? Another unneeded prelude to a "ni'o". This might best be expressed as: ni'o di'e cnino ke mitfa'e lerpoi la .atlstan. noi caze'e zvati tu(pevu) xu ni'o <[({di'e CU <[cnino (ke {mitfa'e lerpoi} KEhE)] VAU>} Athelstan, who incidentally during-for-an-unspecified- (New para.) The next utterance is-a newish, identical- interval is-at somewhere else (besides where you and I reverse, letteral-sequence. (a new palindrome) are) (which-is-a-long-distance) Is this true? Excellent, almost. The following utterance is the entire chunk in the next parse, whereas Michael really wants the In this version, the "pevu" is optional if there was a first sumti of the next utterance. "vo'a pe di'e" might possiblilty that Michael wanted to differentiate between work. "still gone in Europe" from perhaps "still gone visiting This is a tricky problem in anaphora choice. Usage - or his family in Baltimore", which would be a kind of "still the logicians - will have to determine whether quotes in a gone from your nearby presence", implied by the greeting sumti are part of that sumti. "vo'a" could be vocative. But I wouldn't be so perverse as to misinterpret misinterpreted to include the non-symmetrical quote marks him that wildly, would I? (Actually, I might. If you use (lu...li'u) in such a metalinguistic reference as this, and strange and complex grammatical constructions and semantic these are not part of the palindrome (la'e vo'a pe di'e, usages without mastering the basic ones, I am forced to maybe?). Perhaps he might have simply put the palindrome stretch my mind quite far to try to figure you out.) in its own utterance, as he promised, and then refer back to it with "di'u" in the following sentence (.i is a sentence separator and is NOT part of the utterance). 88 .i lu .ua vibjbi vau li'u zmadu lei mordrata leka plikakne "(Discovery!) Vagina-near-thing" is-more-than all-of the su'omei zo'ope'icu'i same-form other-things in-amount-of the-typical being- i {<lu [ua ({vibjbi vau} FAhO)] li'u> CU <zmadu [({lei innately-able-to use (it) by-amount the-number at-least- mordrata KU} {le <ka [(plikakne {su'o mei zo'o pe'i some (Humor!) (I not-necessarily-opine!) cu'i}) VAU] KEI> KU}) VAU]>}) "(Discovery!) vagina-near_thing" is-more-than the-mass-of pattern-others in the property of user-ability at-least- .i to'u .a'o sarji balvi snada vau mi'e maikl. some-cardinality-ness (Humor! I don't necessarily opine!). (i to'u a'o) ({<sarji balvi> snada} {vau <mi'e maikl. The palindrome is neat, grammatical and semantically DOhU>})] FAhO>}) correct, and presumably is a useful comment for a male on In brief, (I hope!) (Observative) Supporter-ly-future the prowl. success, I am Michael. Unfortunately, the rest of his sentence isn't clear at Definitely brief. I prefer "ba sarji snada", which is all; even with the help of his English it appears that he even briefer. Why clutter up a tanru with a tense that can combined the x3 and x4 places of "zmadu". be misinterpreted, when the tense can go in front and be I interpret "lei mordrata" to be "things other than clear?. palindromes in form", whereas he wants "other palindromes". Because Michael did not separate the "mi'e" from the I would try "mitmo'a drata" preceding with an ".i", it attaches to the vau, in effect ("same-form other-things"). He also may not want a mass. making this entire sentence his closing salutation. This You are more than a mass if you are more than any part of is not apparent in his English, but the sentiments seem it. (Example: someone of your height is above you when appropriate to a salutation. Ironically then, his standing on the next higher step of a staircase, even salutation is NOT brief, at least compared to what most though most of her/his body is below your head.) Masses others write. are funny things that are not semantically-familar to English-speakers; be careful when playing with them. (.i .i'acai I give Michael a hard time in these analyses, Michael wanted either "ro le drata" (more than each-of the but at least he keeps trying, and indeed is improving. others), or "piro lei drata" (more than all-of the-mass-of Perhaps Michael can forgive me for not doing this kind of others). analysis on his ever-accumulating poetry (must be over 50 Per my above comments on comparison, x1 and x2 of "zmadu" poems so far), and his several long letters (this was only are not amounts, and therefore x3 should be. This suggests a 5"x8" handwritten sheet, with interlinear translation - "leni plikakne kei" (the amount of user-ableness), or my Michael has written several-page letters typewritten, preference, "leni zu'i ka'e pilno kei" (the amount of the- entirely in Lojban). Keep it up, Michael (only .e'ocai try typical-something being-innately-capable-of-using). The some less creative constructions). latter makes it clearer that it is the x2 place of "pilno" (by explicitly specifying the x1 as something else) that specifies where the palindrome goes in the leni clause. Next Issue (Without clarifying, a perverse reader might think this means "the palindrome is more able to use something than Next issue will be much shorter than this one, at least other palindromes", which is mind-bogglingly implausible as if we want to see a textbook this century. But I'll try to an interpretation - but certainly within bounds for have it out well before LogFest, making a shorter-than- Michael). three-months cycle between issues. I would like to have The "su'omei" is not a sumti, and if it were, would need some of your attempts at the translation project paragraphs a "kei" on the end of the x3 of "zmadu" (as in my version (or tanru or sentences) before then. in the last paragraph) to not be part of the amount. From We expect to have more information on our new software Michael's English, "li su'o" as x4 would convey his products and their prices, and who knows, perhaps a better meaning. estimate on the textbook date. Finally, I presume the attitudinals on the end belong on the whole utterance. Where they are, they apply only to the final sumti. In Lojban, you either need to put the attitudinal on the front of the sentence (in this case perhaps unfortunately flagging the humor before making the joke), or putting it on an explicit "vau" at the end of the sentence. With all these comments, my version of the last two sentences would thus read: ni'o vo'a pe di'e cnino ke mitfa'e lerpoi. .i lu .ua vibjbi vau li'u zmadu piro lei mitmo'a drata leni zu'i ka'e pilno kei li su'o vau zo'ope'icu'i (New para. The-first-sumti pertaining-to the-next- utterance is-a new, same-reverse letter-sequence. The expected highlight will be John Cowan's "selma'o catalog", a complete listing of each of the selma'o (lexemes/gramemes) with an explanation of how each is used, and LOTS of examples. This will not only be an important addition to the tools available to you as Lojban learners, it will also be a part of the Lojban dictionary - the first part of that work to be completed. John has given us a draft already - it will probably be longer than the rest of the issue. The text is being extensively reviewed by several people, and even more examples will be added before it is done. NEWS RELEASE 8 February 1991 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Robert LeChevalier (703) 385-0273 Trademark Office Rules "Loglan" Generic The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office Appeals Board ruled Tuesday that the name "Loglan" ("logical language") is generic. The Board also ordered cancellation of a trademark registration for "Loglan," held by The Loglan Institute, Inc. of Florida. The summary judgement ruling is a major victory for The Logical Language Group, Inc., a non-profit research group in Fairfax, Virginia. Basis for the Dispute Loglan is an artificial language started in 1955 by Dr. James Cooke Brown. After a June 1960 Scientific American article, the language attracted widespread interest among linguists, computer scientists, and the international language movement. Volunteers aided Brown as work on the language continued into the 1980's. Slow progress and internal disputes caused a steady fall-off of support. This trend grew when Brown claimed copyright on the language for himself and his institute. Major supporters of Loglan founded the Logical Language Group (LLG) in 1987 to reverse Loglan's declining support. Separate from Brown, LLG finished a public domain version of Loglan and promoted its use. The LLG version is called Lojban, based on the word for "logical language" in that version of the language. Facing a loss of control over the language, Brown registered a trademark in "Loglan" in early 1988. The trademark and copyright claims restricted the rights of long-time workers and supporters of Loglan. Many felt the claims a betrayal of earlier promises. A legal battle followed, leading to the present decision. Importance of Loglan/Lojban Loglan/Lojban is a written and spoken human language. Its original purpose was research in language and culture. Loglan/Lojban is simple and logical, and has an unambiguous grammar. Thus, computer scientists view Loglan/ Lojban as a likely tool for artificial intelligence research and human-computer communications. Educators believe Loglan/Lojban can be an effective tool in foreign language education. As an artificial language, Loglan/Lojban also attracts followers of the international language movement. This movement seeks a culture-free alternative to languages such as English, and promotes international communication and world peace. The Logical Language Group supports these uses. People have used Lojban in conversation for over a year; the language was completed in August 1990. Over 100 people are actively studying the language. Hundreds more await a Lojban textbook, expected later in 1991. These people live all over the world, with concentrations in Washington DC, Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Volunteers lead classes and study groups in these and other cities. LLG sells teaching materials, computer programs, and other materials. Importance of the Trademark Victory The trademark dispute has constrained LLG in promoting the language. Millions of readers are familiar with the name "Loglan" from magazine articles and science fiction novels. Legal threats from Brown intimidated many people from committing their full support. The ruling frees these people to support Loglan/Lojban without fear of reprisal. The decision also will encourage computer researchers to invest time and money in Loglan/Lojban. Finally, this decision removes a major obstacle to resolving the underlying disputes and reuniting the Loglan effort. 1 Changes to the Published cmavo Lists as of 25 February 1991 (Some changes are contingent on approval of John Cowan's proposed grammar baseline changes.) .uibu (BY*) - assign with meaning "smiley face" be'u (UI) - assign with meaning "lack/need"; was UNK "lack/need - presence/satisfaction - satiation" be'ucu'i (UI*) - assign with meaning "presence/satisfaction" "lack/need - presence/satisfaction - satiation" be'unai (UI*) - assign with meaning "satiation" "lack/need - presence/satisfaction - satiation" bu'o (GOhA) - free (UNK) bu'u (GOhA) - free (UNK) ce'i (MOI) - selma'o change to PA; meaning changes to 'percent' as a number; works with si'e to form percentages of the MOI variety co'e (DU) - free (UNK) denpa bu (BY*) - assign with meaning "." do'e (DOhE) - free (UNK) du (DU) - selma'o change to GOhA tedu'o (BAI*) - djuno place structure change; assign with meaning "under epistemology ..." fa'anai (FAhA*) - meaning corrected to "not towards point" fau (BAI) - fasnu place structure change gives minor meaning change foi (FOI) - meaning change to "end composite letteral" gau (BAI) - meaning change due to place structure change of gasnu "with actor/agent ..." case tag gaunai (BAI*) - "with passive ..." case tag ge'o (BY) - meaning change to "Greek alphabet shift"; Cyrillic to ru'o je'o (DU) - selma'o change to BY; assign with meaning "Hebrew alphabet shift"; was jo'o jo'o (BY) - meaning change to "Arabic alphabet shift"; Hebrew to je'o joibu (BY*) - assign with meaning "&" ka'o (PA) - assign with meaning "imaginary i"; from lu'o; was UNK la'o (BY) - selma'o change to ZOI; assign with meaning "the foreign named"; foreign spelling permitted within quotes lau (LAU) - meaning change to "punctuation mark/special symbol" lo'a (BY) - assign with meaning "Lojban/Roman alphabet shift"; replaces nei with meaning clarification; was UNK lu'a (UI) - selma'o change to LUhI; assign with meaning "the members/components of ..."; old meaning moved to sa'enai lu'anai (UI*) - free; old meaning moved to sa'e lu'o (PA) - selma'o change to LUhI; assign with meaning "the mass with components ..."; old meaning moved to ka'o me'i (DU) - selma'o change to PA; now "less than" as a digit meryru'u bu (BY*) - assign with meaning "$" ne'o (FAhA) - assign with meaning "adjacent/touching"; was UNK ne'u (FAhA) - assign with meaning "directly away from point"; was UNK nei (BY) - free (UNK) re'o (REhO) - free (UNK) ri'i (DU) - selma'o change to BAI; assign with meaning "happens to ...; experienced by ..."; lifri modal ru'o (BY) - assign with meaning "Cyrillic alphabet shift"; was UNK sa'e (BY) - selma'o change to UI; assign with meaning "precisely - loosely"; old meaning moved to se'e se'a (UI) - assign with meaning "self-sufficiency"; was UNK; "self-sufficiency - dependence" se'anai (UI*) - assign with meaning "dependence"; "self-sufficiency - dependence" se'e (BY) - assign with meaning "IPA alphabet shift"; from sa'e; was UNK se'o (UI) - assign with meaning "I know by internal experience" (dream, divine revelation, etc.); was UNK sefau (BAI*) - freed by place structure change to fasnu segau (BAI*) - freed by place structure change to gasnu tegau (BAI*) - freed by place structure change to gasnu seri'i (BAI*) - assign with meaning "experiencing ..." si'e (DU) - selma'o change to MOI, with meaning x1 is a n-portion of x2, where n is a number slaka bu (BY*) - assign with meaning "," 2 tau (BY) - selma'o change to LAU te'e (DU) - free (UNK) tei (TEI) - meaning change to "composite lerfu" ti'o (TIhO) - selma'o change to SEI to'o (BY) - free (UNK) vu'a (DU) - free (UNK) vu'e (DU) - free (UNK) vu'o (DU) - free (UNK) .ybu (BY*) - free; meaning assigned to ".y'ybu" .y'ybu (BY*) - assign with meaning "y" za'u (DU) - selma'o change to PA; now "greater than" as a digit zai (ZAI) - selma'o change to LAU zi, za, zu (ZA) - clarify that these are scalar distances in time only, and correspond to lexeme VA for space- time. Use ZEHA and VEhA for time and space-time intervals net 9 assigned from UNK; 11 freed to UNK