Hallo conlangers!

On Saturday 25 January 2014 21:47:20 And Rosta wrote:

> I've too many replies to fit in one message that could hope to get read by
> anybody, and there are a couple of dozen messages I've been wanting to
> reply to, so I'm breaking my replies down by theme. Here's stuff
> pertaining to Lojban, Xorban and Liva.
> [...]
> Incidentally, it should be acknowledged that the main aim of the founders
> of Lojban was to create a stable freely-usable version of Loglan as soon
> as possible. Relative to that overriding aim, the founders succeeded
> pretty completely, and hence it is unfair to describe the Lojban project
> as a failure, and indeed it is only fair to acknowledge the founders'
> conspicuous success.

Sure.  That, alas, is the only meaningful gauge of a conlang's
success: fulfilment of *its own goals*.

>       But in my view, the design they baselined is
> worthless as a baselined design; its value is only as an unsuccessful
> first draft that serves as a springboard to a better second draft. And the
> further value of the project lies in the concentration of many clever and
> ingenious minds that have been drawn to it.

If it doesn't satisfy *you*, just go ahead and make your own.
Nobody shall stop you.  Yet, that doesn't mean that it was
"worthless" - it is just not what you feel that it has to
be done.

Why, for instance, did I make my own elflang with Old Albic?
Weren't Quenya and Sindarin good enough?  Surely, Quenya and
Sindarin are excellent conlangs.  But my Elves aren't Tolkien's
Elves, and I had some ideas for my elflang that weren't in
Tolkien's - so I made my own elflang.  That doesn't mean that
Tolkien's elflangs were in my opinion failures.
 
> R A Brown, On 20/01/2014 14:50:
> [...]
> > I hadn't noticed that reference to Liva.  But is Liva
> > _patently_ a failure. In his introduction to Liva, Claudio
> > Gnoli wrote: "Liva is constructed mainly for fun. It has no
> > practical aim."
> > 
> > It seems to me to have been successful in that regard   :)
> > 
> > He also wrote: "It is conceived as a very unambiguous and
> > logical language, at all its levels."  I guess it is in this
> > that And regards Liva as a failure. Yet I would be
> > interested to know in what respect Liva was not unambiguous
> > and/or not logical at all levels.  This is a serious request.
> 
> Liva succeeds relative to its own goals, but not relative to what I
> consider to be the criterion of success for loglangs (in my definition of
> _loglang_, which includes a specification of what the criteria for success
> are). To be even fairer to Liva, no loglang I know of has succeeded.

Yes, you already said that.

> Claudio wasn't aiming to satisfy the criterion of success that I have
> specified, tho that is not because he had considered it and rejected it
> but rather because this was 20 years ago and we individually and
> collectively knew less.

Fine; most people now know more than 20 years ago.
 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 21/01/2014 15:47:
> [...]
> > Which means that Lojban has a *huge* head start over Xorban.
> 
> Not really. By Lojban's main aim of being a stable freely usable version of
> Loglan, it was never running the same race as Xorban, and has already won
> the race. By its subsidiary aim, inherited from Loglan, of being spoken
> predicate logic, it has already essentially lost the race -- which is to
> say not necessarily that it is a winnable race but rather that Lojban fell
> by the wayside sooner.

I understand.  What I meant with Lojban having a "huge head start"
was that it is by far the most popular loglang.  I said nothing
on how much it fits *your* bill.
 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/01/2014 14:52:
> [...]
> > Yes.  The same way most auxlangers are content with Esperanto
> > and feel that creating a new auxlang would not only be a waste
> > of effort but also cause a fragmentation of the community, most
> > loglangers are content with Lojban and feel that creating a new
> > loglang would not only be a waste of effort but also cause a
> > fragmentation of the community.
> 
> It's not true that most loglangers are content with Lojban. No loglangers
> are content with Lojban qua loglang. That's a no-brainer, I think.

Really?  Why then is Lojban so popular?  But I am not a member
of the loglanger scene, so I cannot speak for them.

>       What
> Gleki is saying is that Lojban wins against most conlangs in a competition
> based on the average level of community activity.

Yes.

>       If you're looking for a
> lively community based around a conlang not linked to broader fandom (as
> with Klingon, Elvish etc) and with a strong focus on linguistic matters
> (so not so much Esperanto), then Lojban and Toki Pona look to be the main
> candidates. The founders of Lojban felt that Lojban could be accounted a
> success only if it had a speech community, notionally on the grounds that
> only that would allow for the ostensible Whorfian experiment Loglan
> purported to be, but to some extent also because the founders wanted to
> create a language and conceived of a speech community as a necessary
> condition of languagehood.

Surely, there are two meanings of "success" involved here:

1. Success in attaining a speaker community that actually uses
   the language.

2. Success in meeting the design goals specified by the author.

Those of course are two utterly different things.  Lojban has
scored some success of the first kind (though its speaker
community is small), but I cannot gauge its success of the
second kind.

And of course, success in meeting criteria imposed by a third
party is another thing yet.  You are getting into "Is Quenya
a good IAL?" territory here.
 
> R A Brown, On 22/01/2014 17:38:
> [...]
> > IME critics of Lojban will point out errors and maintain
> > that few if anybody actually uses the language correctly.
> > The result is, alas, that people such Jörg and myself are
> > left somewhat bewildered.
> > 
> > But even if Lojban is, for the sake of argument, viable as a
> > human language, the question implied in the subject line is
> > still not answered.  My understanding is that many consider
> > that Lojban has drifted away from being a proper loglang.
> > But I'll return to that below.
> 
> To repeat what I've said before:
> * I think it is possible to use a subset of Lojban as an everyday human
> language, possibly with some drift from the baseline.

Apparently.  I have been told that some Lojbanists are indeed
able to converse in Lojban, even if they make mistakes.

> * Some bits of Lojban aren't human-usable.

Maybe; if something is *always* mishandled, it is a good
candidate of unusability.  Are there things in Lojban that
people always get wrong?

> * Altho Lojban is perhaps the best-described of all conlangs, its
> description still covers only a small part of what even a minimally
> complete description of an actual language would require. In particular,
> the rules specifying what sentences mean are very incomplete.

Which language is completely described at all?

> * When I was
> actively involved with Lojban, the usage of even the most fluent users
> (other than Jorge Llambias) was spectacularly incompetent, in that what
> the sentences they used meant (to the extent that they could be said to
> have meaning) differed hugely and inadvertently from what the speakers
> were attempting to encode in their sentences. Furthermore, fluent users
> were fluent only in certain areas of the language; there were many
> constructions and areas of the grammar in which nobody was fluent. I
> suspect things are slightly better now, but not to any great extent.

If that is the case, then Lojban (as specified by the LLG) may
indeed by unusable.

> The Lojban founders had wanted the language to be defined by usage rather
> than by the initial design. I think that's the best way of viewing Lojban
> now.

Fair.
 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/01/2014 20:38:
> [...]
> > It proves nothing as we don't know how much time the author
> > spent on constructing it.  Is Lojban speakable in real time?
> > Are there any people *fluent* in Lojban?
> 
> If correct usage is defined by the norms of actual usage, then yes there
> are. For those whose usage conforms to the codified standard, I suspect
> their fluent conformity to the codified standard relies on a kind of
> brute-force intellect rather than on the capabilities of the human
> language faculty.

I see.  With natlangs, correct usage is of course defined by the
norms of actual usage; but Lojban is a conlang, so one could say
that actual usage diverging from the author's specification is
wrong with some justification.
 
> >> IME critics of Lojban will point out errors and maintain
> >> that few if anybody actually uses the language correctly.
> >> The result is, alas, that people such Jörg and myself are
> >> left somewhat bewildered.
> > 
> > Exactly.  If all available text samples of Lojban are riddled
> > with errors, it seems likely that the language is actually
> > unusable.
> 
> Or that it has become something usable but different from the original
> design. The Lojban founders would be sanguine about that.

Then nothing is at fault, at least from their standpoint.

> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/01/2014 20:38:
> [...]
> > I would like to know, too!  Why are Lojban and all the others
> > failures?  What is wrong with them?  And what is it that makes
> > Xorban a success?
> 
> Xorban gets much closer to unambiguous lossless encoding of
> predicate--argument structure in a way that is concise and ergonomic.
> Xorban does so much better than the others that only Xorban deserves to be
> considered state-of-the-art. Xorban is still not good enough, tho; I
> wouldn't wish for it to be adopted as the loglang Esperanto.

Maybe.  I have no opinion on this because

1) I haven't seen Xorban yet;
2) I am not a loglanger and not equipped to judge a loglang.
 
> [...]

On Saturday 25 January 2014 21:47:26 And Rosta wrote:

> I've too many replies to fit in one message that could hope to get read by
> anybody, and there are a couple of dozen messages I've been wanting to
> reply to, so I'm breaking my replies down by theme. Here's stuff
> pertaining to loglanging in general.
> 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 20/01/2014 20:53:
> >>> 2014/1/15 And Rosta wrote:
> >>>> I suspect that a viable loglang design is a mathematical
> >>>> impossibility
> > 
> > I don't know whether loglangs are unworkable or not, but I feel
> > that they are so far removed from ordinary human languages that
> > they are at least very hard to attune to for human beings. Also,
> > language and formal logic just *do not serve the same purpose*,
> > which is why I consider it meaningless and misguided to demand
> > that a human language ought to be based on formal logic.  Using
> > a phonetically encoded system of formal logic to *converse* is
> > nothing else than using a tool to an end it is not made for.
> > This is also the reason why I consider Lojban or any other
> > logical language a poor choice for an IAL (apart from the point
> > that the auxlang race has been run already, and English is the
> > winner).
> 
> I think most linguisticians would disagree with you on this to a greater or
> lesser extent. Most linguisticians would agree that a major ingredient of
> the meaning sentences encode is a predicate--argument structure, which is
> what predicate logic notation notates. There are probably not quite as
> many who think quantifier--variable structure is part of what natlangs
> encode, but (i) very many linguisticians do, (ii) I do, and (iii) I don't
> consider quantifiers essential to loglanghood (-- that is, I think every
> language needs quantifiers, but having or not having them is not criteral
> for counting as a loglang). To expand on this point, the very purpose of
> human language is to convert logical forms into audible forms; logical
> forms are the forms of the propositional ideas that languages encode.

I think I understand.  Of course, all human languages have
predicates and arguments; this is a truism.  It is only the
question *how* predicate-argument structures are encoded in the
language, I guess.  This is the matter which language typologists
call "morphosyntactic alignment".  An interesting field which
every conlanger ought to wrap his head around; it not only gives
good ideas to pursue in conlangs, but also teaches what not to
take for granted (for instance, there are languages - natlangs! -
where it is hard to tell which NP is the subject of the sentence).
Loglangs, I think, are a special type of morphosyntactic alignment
that works at a deeper level than the structures found in natlangs.
 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 21/01/2014 15:47:
> > The suitability of a conlang to the application as an IAL
> > does not belong here; it belongs to AUXLANG.  Just one brief
> > remark: Given the wide range of international communication,
> > from ordering drinks at a bar in a foreign country to presenting
> > results of scholarly work on an international conference, I feel
> > that a good IAL must be a good general-purpose language.
> > 
> > And I feel that logical languages are *not* viable for general
> > purpose.  Conversation is conversation; formal logic is formal
> > logic.  Using formal logic, even if wrapped in consonants and
> > vowels, for conversation, probably does not work well.  However,
> > I haven't tried, and perhaps the Lojbanists have made a different
> > experience.
> 
> I wouldn't agree that loglangs aren't viable for general purposes; but it's
> very probably the case that loglangs would not be learnable and usable by
> most adult humans, which is of course a requirement for the sort of IAL
> whose purpose is ot be a universal lingua franca. The purpose of a loglang
> as an IAL would be to allow people to encode their intended meanings in an
> unambiguous way, to the elimination of much obfuscatory vagueness and
> misunderstanding.

At least, such a loglang ought to have a grammar more easily
understandable than Lojban's!  I have tried several times to
understand how Lojban works, but I was always lost in a mess of
Lojban words for the structures of that language.  My head was
whirring with questions such as "What, again, was a selbri?"
The snag with the way Lojbanists talk is that you have to know
Lojban to understand their texts.  The locker is locked; the
key lies in the locker.
 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/01/2014 20:38:
> > My original point, however, was not whether Lojbanists are
> > capable of composing error-free utterances in a few seconds,
> > though that constitutes a test.  My point was that languages
> > and formal logic serve different purposes.  Languages are for
> > conversation; formal logic is for proving assertions.  Loglangs
> > try to utilize formal logic (disguised as a language) for
> > conversation, which I consider a misuse of formal logic.  At
> > least, I don't understand what is to be gained from such a
> > misuse, as conversation demands things from its medium that
> > are *different* from what formal logic supplies.
> 
> If you are thinking of formal logic as something for proving assertions,
> then it becomes easier to understand why you think that formal logic is
> unsuitablle as a basis for a general-purpose conlang. But loglangers don't
> think of logic as something for proving assertions. Rather, it is firstly
> a method of analysing the internal structure of propositions. For some
> people, and for a few loglangers, it is also a way of modelling the import
> of propositions by modelling their relation to states-of-affairs, but in
> general, questions about the 'semantics' of logical forms are peripheral
> to loglangers' interests.

I see.  Of course, the loglangers don't see their languages as
tools for proving assertions.  They see them as *languages*,
i.e. tools for conversation.
 
> [...]
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/01/2014 20:38:
> > On a related issue, Rick Morneau has written an essay on the
> > unsuitability of loglangs as machine translation interlinguae.
> > It used to be on Rick Harrison's web site; I don't have it at
> > hand right now, but as far as I can remember his point was
> > that loglangs are so far removed from natural languages that
> > using them as interlinguae amounts to an unnecessary detour.
> > (Of course, Morneau has his own axe to grind in this field.)
> 
> I discussed this with Rick. To some extent he just had the visceral dislike
> of Logical/Formal Semantics that many folk interested in 'Lexical
> Semantics' have. But he also took the view that because natlangs don't
> bother to encode logical form losslessly and unambiguously, there was no
> need to want the interlingua to.

I think that losslessness and unambiguity are virtues in an
interlingua.  But how does one translate from an ambiguous
language into an unambiguous one?  I think this is the heart
of the problem.  Also, many of Rick's points do not apply to
loglangs in general, but specifically to Lojban, and a different
loglang may avoid some of the problems.

> [...]
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 20/01/2014 20:53:
> > On Monday 20 January 2014 15:50:41 R A Brown wrote:
> >> It was the apparently irreconcilable aims of my Briefscript
> >> project that eventually led me to abandon it.
> > 
> > Fair.  It is a waste of resources to try to follow through a
> > project that has turned out not to work.  When you reach the
> > point where you know that any hope of success is illusory,
> > you just ought to stop.
> 
> There being "*apparently* irreconcilable aims" does not entail that "you
> *know* any hope of success is illusory". So if you just ought to stop,
> then the stopping should be a pausing, a hiatus, not a wholesale
> irrevocable abandonment.

Sure.  One should *never* discard an abandoned project.  You
may find a use for it or for parts of it later.

>       In the same way that I think Ray does, when I
> face an apparently intractable design problem, I turn it over in mind, let
> it slowly marinade in the juices of idle mentation, and then sometimes you
> suddenly light upon a solution. (Having said that, I've found that
> deciding to abandon a project is in fact a good way to bring it back to
> life; somehow the decision to cease the fruitless expense of effort and to
> extinguish the oppressive effects of continual failure has a liberating
> effect, allowing one to reengage with renewed freedom and gusto.)

Fine.

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