Re: Chief logician?

[Nick Legend Nicholas <nsn@SPEECH.LANGUAGE.UNIMELB.EDU.AU>]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Randall Holmes jay'?

=what any individual thinks.  There is a proper function for an
=advisory body in the area of correct logical usage, however.  My
=suspicion is that the logical features of the language (either
=language) would collapse under the pressure of widespread usage, and
=will become closely analogous to "bad" NL usages in hard cases; the
=_option_ of logical clarity will remain.  Machine parseability (and
=maybe the logical usages to some extent) could continue to be enforced
=if a major part of the speech community consisted of computer
=programs.

This is a very insightful and honest judgement, and I commend you for it.

=A project which both languages should consider is the mechanization of
=not only the grammar of the language but of the allowed logical
=transformations; this would make it possible for interaction with
=machines to enforce the logical usages.  In the limit, the
=construction of a theorem prover with (possibly subset) Loglan/Lojban
=as the input language should be considered.

My semantic analyser (in the Lojban ftp site) is a start in this direction.
It is by no means much of a start (all it juggles is conjunction and some
quantification), but it's there. This is actually quite a feasible project.

=I won't express an opinion of JCB's linguistics research; I'm not
=competent to do so.  My "feel" for both languages is that they are too
=similar to the native languages of the experimenters; see above.  If I
=were designing a language from scratch, I would have adopted VSO or
=even OSV word order (Polish or reverse Polish notation :-) ), for
=example.  I don't think that the scientific or non-scientific nature
=of JCB's method for contructing primitives, for example, is at all
=relevant to the usability of the language.

It is true that a casual leaf-through of a Lojban (or presumably Loglan,
and certainly Klingon) grammar can give that impression, as can the less
adventurous text. It is up to the individuals to explore. Exploration
is not a guarantee of fluency; for example, Ivan (of blessed memory :-) ) 's
translation of Smirnenski's _Tale of the stairs_ was not that experimental,
but sounded more 'naturally' Lojbanic than anything I've done. On the other
hand, Lojban can afford you delights when you fossick long enough. I was
quite proud of my translation of 'it took my driving instructor and me four
months for me to learn how to drive': .i mi joi lemi karce ctuca cu jai masti
li vo fai lenu mi cilre lepu'e karce sazri .

This kind of thing can be overdone. For example, it's a shibboleth of
literary adroitness in Esperanto to use constructions like verbalised
adjectives that are not present in European languages. But it can also be
illuminating and instructive. And it happens all over the place. My translation
of Hamlet III 1 was being proofread yesterday by another Klingonist (Mark
Shoulson usually proofreads me, but we wanted to save time); he was quite
taken aback by my (extensive) use of zero anaphora (in Lojban terms, omitting
sumti). English, of course, leaves in unstressed pronouns like 'he' and 'it';
in fact, the Klingon grammar as written hints that Klingon does likewise.

But if it's grammatical to leave them out, I will, and I'll see where that
takes me. Wherever it takes me, it takes me away from English; and since I
still need to have the language hang together as a system, where it'll take
me will teach me quite a bit about how languages does hang together as a
system.

The jai-system in Lojban has not yet been sufficiently explored, I suspect;
I expect it will, and that the results will be fascinating.

--
 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
 Nick Nicholas. Melbourne University, Aus. nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au
                                    ---
"Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish.
Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so
grotesque."
-- Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>, <9307262008.AA95951@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>