archives of the CONLANG mailing list
------------------------------------
>From jim@mycroft.rand.org Thu Jul 1 00:28:39 1993
Message-Id: <9306302228.AA06743@mycroft.rand.org>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Cc: jim@mycroft.rand.org
Subject: Shire Reckoning [was Re: Ghost words]
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 01 Jul 93 00:21:04 +0200.
<9306302133.AA22981@brick.purchase.edu>
From: Jim Gillogly
Reply-To: James_Gillogly@rand.org
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 93 15:28:34 PDT
Sender: jim@mycroft.rand.org
This is off-topic for conlang, but:
> The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk -- writes:
> Jim Gillogly says:
> : Jim Gillogly
> : 1 Afterlithe S.R. 1993, 17:02
> Great signature, but how do you relate 24 June (or thereabouts; that's the date
> my mailer says I recieved this) to 1 Afterlithe? I'd expect it to be sometime
> during Forelithe.
I modified JRRT's description of Shire Reckoning slightly. He indicates
that our New Year's Day corresponds more or less to the Shire's 8 Jan
(meaning 8 Afteryule, of course), but he also says that Yule and Midyear's
Day should correspond to the solstices; at 8 Afteryule, Midyear's Day ends
up on our 24 Jun, which is annoyingly distant from the solstice. I
decided unilaterally that some latterday hobbit reformer will have put it
back in order by now by adding in almost a year of Lithe and Yule days
over a decade or so (or leaving out two Overlithes over eight years, which
seems less likely, knowing hobbits), and moved our New Year's Day to 10
Afteryule. This isn't totally unjustified, since JRRT says he's unskilled
in these matters and may well have made some conversion errors. This does
reasonable things to the Lithe and Yule solstices both in leap and normal
years.
For definiteness, here are some correspondences from the documentation of
the Perl program that does this for me.
# Julian Julian Date
# noleap leap
# 1 1 10 Afteryule
# 21 21 30 Afteryule
# 51 51 30 Solmath
# 81 81 30 Rethe
# 111 111 30 Astron
# 141 141 30 Thrimidge
# 171 171 30 Forelithe
# 172 172 1 Lithe
# 173 173 Midyear's Day = 22 Jun (non-leap) or 21 Jun (leap)
# (none) 174 Overlithe
# 174 175 2 Lithe
# 175 176 1 Afterlithe
# 204 205 30 Afterlithe
# 234 235 30 Wedmath
# 264 265 30 Halimath
# 294 295 30 Winterfilth
# 324 325 30 Blotmath
# 354 355 30 Foreyule
# 355 356 1 Yule (this year)
# 356 357 2 Yule (next year) = 22 Dec (non-leap) or 21 Dec
# 357 358 1 Afteryule (next year)
# 365 366 9 Afteryule (next year)
More than you ever wanted to know about it, eh? Finally, the time of day
is for the Midlands rather than California, since that's closer to where
the action all took place.
Jim Gillogly
Sterday, 7 Afterlithe S.R. 1993, 22:27
>From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Thu Jul 1 17:48:42 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 08:46:00 -0700
From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
Posted-Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 08:46:00 -0700
Message-Id: <9307011546.AA01845@glia.biostr.washington.edu>
Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu
(911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA01845; Thu, 1 Jul 93 08:46:00 -0700
Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk
| who say that JCB
| insisted that Loglan was his protected intellectual property
As someone personally threatened with a lawsuit by JCB, and as
someone who has seen JCB insist in no uncertain terms that
(literally) every single word in Loglan is copyrighted, and that
the grammar >>as a concept<< is copyrighted, meaning that
absolutely anything written in or parsing Loglan comes under
Loglan Institute copyright, and may not be released without
prior permission from the Loglan Institute, and as someone
who ten years later is still paying hundreds of dollars a
month in legal fees over these sorts of issues, I find the
"who say that" qualifier unneeded. There is ample record of
JCB's position in public court records.
| Perhaps we just need a public domain version!
More or less what the Logical Language Group has done, no?
NB: Jim Brown is a neat guy and a gentleman, notwithstanding
that he's as much of a legal crank on this particular issue as,
say, Apple is on look-and-feel...
>From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Thu Jul 1 17:57:03 1993
Message-Id:
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Subject: Re: Questions from New Member
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 11:03:37 -0400 (EDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1009
Doug Merritt writes:
> Lojban is actually a different language than Loglan,
> although based on the same principles [...]
Well, yes and no. The creolist's term "relexification" is probably the
best description of what has happened. Due to the legal disputes, the
words of Lojban have been newly created using the same algorithms
that JCB used to create the Loglan words (but with better and more
up-to-date data). Almost all Loglan sentences can be translated word-for-word
into grammatical Lojban of essentially the same meaning.
Note that in the 1982-84 timeframe, before the Loglan-Lojban split, the
bulk of the Loglan vocabulary (20% of the primitive words and 100% of the
compound words) were similarly changed, producing "old Loglan" and "modern
Loglan".
As Lojbab said in his long posting, Institute Loglan and Lojban have slowly
drifted apart since 1987, but are still mostly interconvertible.
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban.
>From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Thu Jul 1 19:16:03 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 10:09:42 -0700
From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
Posted-Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 10:09:42 -0700
Message-Id: <9307011709.AA02116@glia.biostr.washington.edu>
Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu
(911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA02116; Thu, 1 Jul 93 10:09:42 -0700
Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk
| If loglan and lojban are the same language, why do they even have
| different names?
Historically, because JCB trademarked 'Loglan', without a legal leg
to stand on. It took a number of years to reverse this in court,
and in the meantime, the Logical Language Group chose to be
conservative and use a different name.
| Could a (perhaps hypothetical) fluent lojbanist
| understand loglan (or vice versa)?
The vocabularies are _much_ different in a superficial sense,
although the underlying methods of construction are very
similar -- I'm tempted to say "essentially identical" -- so,
speaking as someone who learned (one of) the old Loglan
vocabularies, but not the new: No, fluency in one version,
without any exposure to the other, wouldn't likely allow
mutual intelligibility.
| If they aren't mutually intelligable, then are they
| really (perhaps) two different languages with a very similar
| grammar?
Identity is in general a philosophically very slippery concept
-- I tend to regard it as a heuristic. Two things identical
for one purpose may be quite different for another. Lojban
was constructed by many of the same people working on Loglan,
to essentially the same specifications, for essentially the
same goals, using essentially the same techniques (modulo
monotonic development over time and evolving support
technologies such as computing), the lexicon and grammar have
very similar structures: to the extent the concept of identity
applies at all to languages, it is not unreasonable to classify
them as variants of the same language for analytical purposes.
If you, quite reasonably, wish to take mutual intelligibility
as the standard of identity, it is not unreasonable to classify
them as different languages. *shrug*. I recall on my first
visit to England, realizing that in ten minutes conversation
with a new acquaintance, I had not comprehended a single word
said... *grin*.
>From doug@netcom.com Thu Jul 1 19:22:58 1993
Message-Id: <9307011723.AA23954@netcom.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 10:23:29 PDT
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
>As someone personally threatened with a lawsuit by JCB [...]
>[...] month in legal fees over these sorts of issues, I find the
>"who say that" qualifier unneeded. There is ample record of
>JCB's position in public court records.
Since I have not gone to look at the records, and since I was never
involved, and have no direct knowledge of any aspect of this, I
absolutely insist on the correctness of me carefully qualifying it
as a simple relaying of other people's comments. I flatly refuse,
in this or any other circumstance, to be forced to call hearsay
evidence "fact". *You* are welcome to call it fact, since you were/are
directly involved.
There is every reason to sympathize with your story; it sounds like
a painful mess.
But consider intellectual honesty. If I were to hear the other side
of the story, e.g. from JCB, and post that here as "fact", no doubt
you'd be upset at my one-sidedness. Therefore don't harass me for
being neutral. I don't know the facts, and if anything you should be
glad that I admit it...too many people in the world have opinions
about things for which they don't have sufficient (or any!) basis.
Again I sympathize, and I don't like what I hear about JCB's legal
tactics one bit, and I *am* influenced by all of this...I'm only
human. But I regard it as a virtue to be intellectually honest, and
since I haven't gone to the trouble of asking JCB about it in order
to try to deduce a balanced view, then I'll give myself a pat on
the back for not just automatically taking your side of it, which
would be the easy thing to do.
Even people accused of Nazi war crimes are supposed to get a fair trial
rather than a prejudgement. You're a participant and witness. I'm just
an onlooker after the fact.
If you want empathy rather than an argument from me, though, you could
simply say things like "I assure you those are facts" etc etc, rather
than tell me to say things differently.
BTW I'm on JCB's mailing list as the result of common friends asking him
to put me on it...I'm not even a little bit active there, nor in logical
language stuff in any way these days (though I was in the late 70's),
which is *why* I'm not following up on any of this, in case you're wondering.
I've got other irons in the fire, and simply kibitz every once in a long
while on the conlang list.
>NB: Jim Brown is a neat guy and a gentleman, notwithstanding
>that he's as much of a legal crank on this particular issue as,
>say, Apple is on look-and-feel...
That makes sense, and fits what I know of him from the 70's and from
comments from our mutual friends, for what it's worth.
Doug
>From doug@netcom.com Thu Jul 1 19:29:44 1993
Message-Id: <9307011730.AA24983@netcom.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 10:30:20 PDT
In-Reply-To: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
"" (Jul 1, 7:19pm)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
>Identity is in general a philosophically very slippery concept
>-- I tend to regard it as a heuristic. Two things identical
>for one purpose may be quite different for another.
This is true in many deep ways and has vast implications in
many/most areas of math (leading to popular phrases like "equivalent up
to isomorphism"), and has of course also been deeply delved into
in philosophy.
However my favorite quote on the subject comes from G. Spencer Brown's
"Laws of Form":
The symbol ``='' shall be used to denote ``is confused with''.
Doug
>From ucleaar%ucl.ac.uk@mail-a.bcc.ac.uk Thu Jul 1 20:00:26 1993
From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta)
Message-Id: <9307011759.AA126758@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>
To: Tolkien Language List
Cc: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: How to say 'into' in Quenya
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Wed, 30 Jun 93 22:53:48 D.)
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 93 18:59:45 +0100
Sender: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk
>[ Alternatively, you could make the effort to learn some basic linguistics.
> The point of jargon is that you *don't* have to explain everything at
> length all the time. There should be plenty of introductory linguistic
> texts available in any academic bookshop. -- jcb ]
I recommend R.L.Trask (1993) _Dictionary of grammatical terms_ (or
something like that) London: Routledge. This is excellent on
grammatical terms, and is bang up to date with contemporary grammatical
theory, as well as good on traditional terms.
For a broader but less thorough dictionary than Trask's, I recommend
David Crystal (19??) _Dictionary of Phonetics and Linguistics_,
published either by Blackwell (in U.K.) or by Longman (I can't
remember which).
----
And.
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 2 02:00:36 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 20:00:28 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307020000.AA25550@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Lojban vs. Loglan
All Lojban design definition is placed in the public domain. In most cases,
this is explicitly stated in the files on the PLS. Materials-in-progress,
and texts in and about the language are generally copyrighted with liberal
permissions for distributions approximating those permitted by Free Software
Foundation.
Thus Lojban is THE public domain version of Loglan, and that was essentially
why we split from JCB, to make a public domain version. The design differences,
although more significant to us now than then, were not a factor in the
decision to split. We did the redesign because JCB said that we couldn't use
his design without violating his copyright. We then researched what was
needed to avoid copyright violation, and initially planned to do only that
much, but quickly realized that we might as well fix the known bugs in the
language while we were at it, especially since we had the help of the top
Loglan logician, John Parks-Clifford, to help us verify that what we were
considering to be bugs, really needed fixing.
Since then, there has been some slow divergence between versions, because
Lojban unlike Loglan has acquired a significant speaking and writing
community (that is, unlike JCB's Loglan), and we have found usages that needed
greater robustness in the language. However, the trend in JCB's version
has been to 'rediscover' our changes a few years later, either independently
or by learning from our results, such that the two versions of the language
really haven't diverged that much.
I should also note, in response to this query, that Esperanto is NOT owned
by anyone, and that Zamenhof explicitly put his language in the public
domain, probably at least partially in response to Volapu:k, which was the
subject of justr such an 'ownership' dispute. Both Lojban and Esperanto
have benefited from the people who have been attracted by this policy, and
the public-domain-ness of the language has turned out in neither case to
be paritcularly encouraging to splinter-groups (one fear of those who claim
ownership is that they will lose control and the language design will lose
its integrity, but this has not happened with either Lojban or Esperanto,
and both communities seem extremely willing to accept language prescription
on design issues.)
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
For information about the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, please
provide a paper-mail address to me via mail or phone. We also have
limited introductory information available electronically. The LLG is
funded solely by your contributions, which are encouraged for the purpose
of defraying our costs (for both electronic and paper distribution.)
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 2 02:37:59 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 20:37:52 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307020037.AA26116@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Lojban vs. Loglan
Re Marty's questions:
> If loglan and lojban are the same language, why do they even have
> different names? (apart from English vs. loglan/lojban translation?)
> In other words, why change the name if they are indeed the same
> language? Or better expressed, why wasn't it a true "name change",
> with the name "loglan" phased out? Both appear to exist today.
Basically because a lot of people out there know the language as 'Loglan'.
We fought the trademark battle over the right to reach out to these
people - the millions who have read the Scientific American article, and the
thousands who bought the Loglan books in the 60s and 70s, or who have seen
them in libraries, Lojban is NOT a new language or a new design, but one that
has seen a lot of work and a lot of testing; it is worth a lot for people
interested in working with a conlang to know that it isn't a short term
creation of one person, but a long-standing project with significant goals.
Second reason - 'Loglan' is a valid name for the language - IN ENGLISH. It
is a contraction for the words 'logical language'. The corresponding words
in Lojban are 'logji bangu' and the compounding method of Lojban puts these
together exactly as the English compound is put together, with result
'Lojban'. Thus like the existance of 'Spanish' and 'Espan~ol', they are
two names for the same language. Note that the actual 'English' name of
Lojban adopted when we started the project was "Lojban - A Realization of
Loglan", which in English tends to be abbreviatied to 'Lojban'. (The
Lojban name would not be capitalized, but instead is tagged with a name
marker.) We adopted a 'different' name primarily so that we could keep
clear in people's minds which version we were talking about when talking
about multiple versions. Thus we talk about 1960 Loglan, 1975 or pre-GMR
Loglan, 1984 or post-GMR-Loglan, and TLI Loglan for JCB's current version,
and Lojban for our current version.
> If it is a matter of vocabulary substitution, how great are the
> --More--
> differences? Could a (perhaps hypothetical) fluent lojbanist
> understand loglan (or vice versa)? of loglan> If they aren't mutually intelligable, then are they
> really (perhaps) two different languages with a very similar
> grammar? (Similar, since lojban has added some bells and
> whistles.)
>
> I guess based on your (Lojbab) comments, I don't understand how
> these are the same language, unless the vocabulary substitution
> is minor, or regular in its deviation (each from the other). It
> sounds like different languages - or, at least - different
> mutually unintelligable dialects.
My wife and I, who are not quite fluent Lojbanists who have not studied the
old vocabulary in 6 years can more or less read TLI Loglan - Nora can often
do this without a dictionary or wordlist, since she more thoroughly learned
the words before we split off. John Cowan, who started much later after
the split, uses a word list with both languages, but can probably read each
equally well. The changes in either language over the last few years are
sufficiently minor that you can usually deduce what a new word or construct
means from context (and indeed we have had to since JCB's grammar is a
trade secret especially to keep it from my eyes, though this hasn't really
hurt my ability to understand the texts).
The vocabulary substitution or relexification is minor or not minor,
depending on how you look at it. We completely reinvented the word list,
and made some minor changes in morphology, but some 42 of the 900 words on
JCBs lists when we started did not change, since the algorithm was the same,
and in those cases, so was the data (the wieghtings did change, since JCBs
weights were based on 1950 speaker populations). In natural languages, a
complete substitution of words would probably mean that you would call them
two separate languages, except that this never happens in natlangs. Instead,
merely sound changes occur. But is Shakespeaean English a different langauge
than modern English - you will find several words in the corpus that are
not in the current language, although there are words that could replace them.
Similarly, the King James Bible and new translations are considered the
'same book' even though you will find wholesale changes in word choices due
to the change in vocabulary since the 1600s. It becomes a harder question
as to whether Chaucer's English is the same langauge as modern English -
the word changes and sound changes are much more drastic, and I for one
can read JCB's Loglan better than I can Chaucer's English (though I might do
better if I had a dictionary of Middle English).
On the other hand, like those languages, the underlying grammar of Loglan
Lojban is essentially unchanged since the 70s, if not since the 60s, so that
in either case, direct word substitution of the new vocabulary in the old
text will give you quite accurate modern readings (there is some archaisms
in grammar, too - American English seldom uses subjectives, for example,
and there are probably some usages that would even be considered
ungrammatical unless some rephrasing took place, but the reader would still
have no trouble understanding the word-substituted dialect.
I should note that modern English is not itself mutually intelligible across
its current spread. Don Harlow has anecdotal data on how unintelligible
African and Indian dialects of English are, and the English of India and
Singapore and Phillipines are considerably different from American or British
English, so as to be not mutually intelligible for some Western speakers.
I think the same is true for many languages that have a 'standard' dialect
and regional dialects. People on sci.lang have commented on the difficulties
of mutual understanding between Swiss German, High German, and Low German.
So the bottom line, like with natlangs, is that a language is considered a
'different' language if its speakers consider it different (usually for
political or nationalistic reasons). We prefer to consider all versions to
be dialects of a single language, stressing the essential unity of the
design and goals, and for the most part of the entire community (we don't have
current data, due to JCB's ytrade secrets, but over 75% of JCBs suppporters
, called aficioanados, in his last published list, were also Lojbanists; in general, people who are supporters of JCB who also have investigated Lojban,
support both efforts (or have completely switched to Lojban)).
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 2 03:08:52 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 93 21:08:44 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307020108.AA26574@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: response to Doug on legal issues
I doubt that Jeff, or myself, for that matter expect everyone to accept
our points of view on JCB's legal position. As for there being a fair
trial, well - in this case there was: the decision on the legal issues
by the Patent and Trademark Office, was appealed to the Circuit Court of
Appeals by JCB, which held a trial. The appeal was denied.
We have a complete copy of all the legal documents filed by both sides in the
archives, and they are available to anyone for inspection (though I realize
that isn't really practical for most people - the documents run several
thousand pages, too, so copying is out in most cases). We did run the
full text of the decision by the Court of Appeals in our newsletter and
journal last year (you've never given us an address, Doug, which is why
you did not get this - I'd be happy to remedy the situation).
I should note also that it might not be true that we would be in the right
under all laws. Under many European laws, copyright extends to 'moral rights'
by an author over all sorts of derivative works, and derivative is taken
to have extremely broad interpretation. Then the question would come down too
how much of Loglan is JCB's invention and how much was that of the hundreds
of others who have worked on the language. (JCB even gives me credit officially
for one major feature of the current language in the 1989 revision of
_Loglan 1_.) Or it comes down to whether JCB explicitly placed the language in
the public domain, which we believe he did on at least 3 separate occassions,
but which he disputes (the court did not decide specifically on the basis
of this evidence, so it isn't clear whether it would be decisive).
I should chime in also with a statement about Jim Brown's essential genius.
In spite of our disagreements, my work on Lojban has been specifically to honor
what I consider to be him and his invention, to make sure that it gets the
chance to fulfill its promise; I just happen to think that his choices stand
in the way of Loglan achieving its promise. But I was inspired personally by
working with and for JCB, and would not otherwise be involved in the project.
I can also agree that JCB is a gentleman, in the European sense (he has a
very European morality, as he sees it). He presumes that everyone will take
the same attitudes as himself on political issues, though, or at least defer
to him. He idealistically wants to be 'above' politics, but failed to realize
that a community working together will inherently have politics, focussed on
the leadership. On legal issues, he has presumed that the business aspects
of an organization can be condicted solely on the basis of good intentions,
which is not the case.
We continue to hope that there is some reunification of the two efforts in
the future, and have made overtures to JCB several times. He feels my own
work to be a personal betrayal, however, and doesn't seem likely to consider
such efforts.
lojbab
>From doug@netcom.com Fri Jul 2 04:26:42 1993
Message-Id: <9307020227.AA26316@netcom.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1993 19:27:18 PDT
In-Reply-To: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
"response to Doug on legal issues" (Jul 2, 3:25am)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: response to Doug on legal issues
Thanks for your comments, I appreciate the clarifications.
Doug
>From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Fri Jul 2 16:21:23 1993
Message-Id: <9307021421.AA24076@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 93 08:20:06 MDT
From: "Martin R. Bartels"
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: loglan vs. lojban
lojbab:
Thanks for your clarification. I will relegate the question in general
to that of philosophy. For me personally, I am not sure. By the time
that much vocabulary is substituted, I have to question whether these
two conlangs are the same (language) or not. While not speaking either,
I can't say. And certainly, in natlangs, the distinction can be fuzzy.
Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian are considered
different languages. --Yet I have Spanish speaking friends who can
make out the gist of Portuguese or to a lesser extent French.
That's on the side of considering these two "log-lan"s different.
On the other side, I'd already heard of the differences in high/low/swiss
German. Should they be considered dialects or different languages?
Generally, they are considered dialects.
Perhaps one for the side of considering these two "log-lan"s the same.
I feel for the problems in the split, more for the interpersonal ones than
for the technical ones.
Your information has done this - *if* (and, regretably, it is a big *if*)
I were to learn either, it would be lojban rather than loglan. Time is
the problem, and I am already corresponding with a bunch of people in
Esperanto, meaning that some time will continue to be dedicated there.
Side note - I don't know if it was in response to me or not, but my only
reason for saying:
> Well, I suppose that perhaps this perhaps depends on what is
> meant by "public domain". Esperanto - at least generally - would
> qualify. There is no "owner" of Esperanto, apart from the
> speakers. The reason I say "at least generally" is that there
> does exist a language academy for Esperanto. But, nonetheless,
> there is no "owner" (as in copyright or other intellectual
> property protection).
...is that some people* tend to feel that this makes the "academy" the
owner (not in a legal sense, but in some perhaps "moral" sense or some
such). I reject that, but acknowledge that people thing in such a way.
* "some people" are usually non-Esperantists. Interesting.
So, yes, Esperanto (like lojban) is in the public domain. Legally, other
arguments aside. Zamenhof wanted it that way!
Thank you for your response! (I was sincere in my confusion, not
intending a flame.) I don't know that you've answered the issue, but
only because any answer seems to be philosophical (or opinion).
I feel a certain sense of humility (or stupidity) speaking in these ways
to the prime "lojban" person....
---Marty
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Sat Jul 3 03:46:15 1993
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 93 21:46:10 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307030146.AA23026@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: loglan vs. lojban
Certainly Marty should feel no particular humility or stupidity in saying
whatever he feels to me. I am only the prime 'lojban' person by default,
and not by particular intent or desire (and certainly not by anointment,
at least not by JCB, the god of Loglan %^) I am not especially expert in
linguistics, have never developed a conlang from scratch like many of
you have (and probably wouldn't). I may not even be the most expert in all
areas of Lojban anymore, since John Cowan has been doing more work with
the grammar/parser than me, and Nick Nicholas has done more writing/exploring
of stylistic issues.
Yeah, I've thought a lot about philosophy, and even more about whether it is
worth all the effort I/we are putting into it. JCB had a good idea, and
we are seeing it brought into reality. Lojban may never be an international
auxiliary language, it may even, as Rick M. suggests, turn out not to be
fluently speakable. But it is probably the most thoroughly defined conlang
that has ever been invented, so we've accomplished an awful lot. And our
focus on linguistics research means that linguists can learn something from
the Loglan/Lojban experiment even if it fails. Meanwhile it has proven an
interesting and challenging mind-expander for those working on the language,
and more so for those who have tried to speak and write it.
We have pretty much moved past the legal issue; the negotiations ball is in
JCB's court; we have a successful and growing community that is now active
on 3 continents, the start of a Lojban literature, and impending publication
of the first books on the language.
I didn't do all this; the community did. This makes me proud, if I helped
inspire it and lead it, but humble because the project is far more than
any one person could make it. Because, unlike JCB, I am NOT the inventor
of the language, I don't have that kind of possessiveness towards it (though
I admit to partisanly defending it). This in turn makes the effort as a
whole stronger.
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@grebyn.com
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
>From dasher@netcom.com Sat Jul 3 09:50:31 1993
Date: Sat, 3 Jul 93 00:51:07 -0700
From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood)
Message-Id: <9307030751.AA26123@netcom3.netcom.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: jargon
On the virtue of jargon:
"The untrained man reads a paper on natural science and thinks: `Now
why couldn't he explain this in simple language.' He can't seem to realize
that what he tried to read was the simplest possible language--for that
subject matter. In fact, a great deal of natural philosophy is simply a
process of linguistic simplification--an effort to invent languages in
which half a page of equations can express an idea which could not be stated
in less than a thousand pages of so-called `simple' language."
Thon Taddeo
a character in "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (chapter 19)
by Walter M. Miller Jr
>From donh@netcom.com Sun Jul 4 00:34:45 1993
Message-Id: <9307032235.AA12230@netcom2.netcom.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Cc: donh@netcom.com, donh@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Lojban vs. Loglan
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 02 Jul 93 02:24:05 +0200.
<9307020000.AA25550@grebyn.com>
Date: Sat, 03 Jul 93 15:35:19 -0700
From: "Donald J. Harlow"
Lojbab comments...
>
> I should also note, in response to this query, that Esperanto is NOT owned
> by anyone, and that Zamenhof explicitly put his language in the public
> domain, probably at least partially in response to Volapu:k, which was the
> subject of justr such an 'ownership' dispute. Both Lojban and Esperanto
Minor historical quibble: Zamenhof declared Esperanto "in public domain," to
use current terminology, in July, 1887. The question of ownership -- how
much of the question related to "moral ownership" and how much to "legal
ownership" I'm not sure -- of Volapu"k arose in 1888 or 1889. Therefore,
the cause-effect relationship positted by Bob seems unlikely.
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Sun Jul 4 08:50:00 1993
Date: Sun, 4 Jul 93 02:49:32 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307040649.AA19079@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Lojban vs. Loglan
I had heard of a closer proximity of dates than Don Harlow mentions, but don't
have any data handy. I specifically recall being told that in repsonse to
the disputes on Volapu:k reform, whole Voalpu:k cluns switched to the then-new
Esperanto, and that the deserting Volapu:kans were a major portion of the
first couple of year's growth of Esperanto.
I got the impression that the Volapu:k ownership issue simmered for a while
before
this mass desertion. If Zamenhof had his ear to the ground, he might have
heard of the disagreement and made his statement to forestall any questions
(it certainly would have been smart politics). But I have no data to
support this.
lojbab
>From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Fri Jul 9 13:58:36 1993
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1993 12:54:57 +0100
From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: The planned language server
Could someone tell me where the planned language server lives these days
please? I don't seem to have a valid address for it.
Cheers,
Matthew
>From dasher@netcom.com Sun Jul 11 22:54:20 1993
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 93 13:54:54 -0700
From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood)
Message-Id: <9307112054.AA07497@netcom2.netcom.com>
To: scott@cs.ust.hk
Subject: house language
Cc: conlang@diku.dk
Scott Deerwester writes:
- Esperanto. . . .
One major "problem" is that it's *really* easy to understand even if
you've never heard it before. It was designed to be. So it sort of
loses as a "secret language", except maybe in the US. :-)
That is more true of the neolatins like Occidental. Esperanto was not
designed to be easy for the uninitiated to understand; it was designed
to be easy to learn, which is not the same thing. An European polyglot
will recognize most of the _roots_, but the affixes are (as far as I
know) mostly arbitrary, and coining with affixes is what makes
speaking Esperanto fun! ;) For example, if you know no Esperanto,
is it obvious that MALRIC^IGI means `to impoverish'? Also, Zamenhof
made some of arbitrary deformations to fit his structure; even I
sometimes can't remember whether PORT- or PORD- means `door'. (The
other means `carry'.)
A class of obscure languages that you didn't mention is protolanguages
-- e.g. Proto-Celtic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic. I don't know how
much material on these is available.
Proto-languages are a sort of conlang; maybe someone here knows -- is there
a grammar of PIE available in English? (or French?)
Anton Sherwood dasher@netcom.com
+1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA
>From dasher@netcom.com Mon Jul 12 01:35:07 1993
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 93 16:35:44 -0700
From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood)
Message-Id: <9307112335.AA28482@netcom3.netcom.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: metaphor and prepositions
I just read Rick Morneau's June 1 piece about the Russian translation
of "look through a window".
> Russian: Ya smotryu v okno.
> gloss: I look in window.
> English: I look through the window.
>
> The more typical Russian word for "through" would be "cherez", and it
> would be used in contexts involving physical movement along a path or
> tunnel. It is NOT used in the above case. What's even more
> interesting is that it is also not used in the case of throwing
> something (such as a rock) through a window. In this case, the same
> preposition "v" (meaning "into", since motion is implied) would be
> used. Obviously, Russians do not think of a window as something that
> one looks or moves THROUGH. Instead, one looks IN or moves INTO it.
> Perhaps the thickness of the window is the defining criterion in the
> way Russians think of a window.
I would never say "through a path".
What I see here is not that Russian applies the _same_ prepositions
differently, but that English "in(to)" is a crude and inaccurate translation
of Russian "v", whose senses evidently include "penetrating". There are
more preposition senses than preposition words, and different languages
bundle them differently. Even in French, from which English borrowed a lot
of constructions, "a`" (< Latin "ad") cannot be translated one-for-one with
an English word. (This struck me suddenly after I had been speaking French
for years. I was shocked that I hadn't noticed it before.)
I see this not as a metaphor problem, but more like the problem of
translating colors between English and Welsh. Maybe it's possible, as
Zack Smith suggested, to list a few hundred prepositional senses (as Berlin
& Kay assembled paint chips) and study how different languages cluster them.
(Do we even have a handle on *how many* prepositions most languages have?
I once made a list of those in Novial - an immature conlang project - and
was surprised at how long it was.)
Rick later says:
> Try to capture the "on-ness" in: He played a song ON the piano.
> Try to capture the "under-ness" in: He worked UNDER Johnson for 3
> years.
The latter is clearly metaphor. In the former, the player's hands are on
the piano, but the sentence pattern may have been reanalyzed to put the
song on the piano. Does that account for "on the radio"? Perhaps "words
on paper" was generalized in English to "message on medium". Does avoiding
metaphor mean inventing new prepositions, as technology requires us to
express new meanings?
Anton Sherwood dasher@netcom.com
+1 415 267 0685 1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA
>From dasher@netcom.com Mon Jul 12 01:39:13 1993
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 93 16:39:51 -0700
From: dasher@netcom.com (D. Anton Sherwood)
Message-Id: <9307112339.AA28768@netcom3.netcom.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: conflation
Paul Hoffman wrote:
> English frequently "conflates" (combines) fact-of-motion and manner/cause
> of motion in a single lexeme -- for example,
> The bottle _floated_ into the cave.
> Whereas Spanish doesn't normally do this sort of conflation:
> La botella _entro'_ a la cueva (flotando).
> *La botella _floto'_ a la cueva.
Reminds me somehow of P.G.Wodehouse's habit of phrases like
He pointed an inquisitive cigarette.
*\\* Anton
>From matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi Mon Jul 12 21:12:22 1993
Message-Id: <9307121912.AA05140@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1993 20:08:45 +0100
From: matthew@viper.uk.tele.nokia.fi (Matthew Faupel)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Voksigid
I've just been poking around the conlang server to see what's new, and
picked up the article on Voksigid. Could anyone tell me whether there has
been any further material made available about it? In particular, is there
a more formal description of the grammar? The article's explanantion of the
grammar looks as if it has been translated from a more precise YACC/BNF
description into English and is somewhat awkward to follow.
Cheers,
Matthew
>From cgh.cgh.com!lock60!snark!cowan@dsinc.dsi.com Mon Jul 12 20:38:22 1993
Message-Id:
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Subject: Re: relexification
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1993 13:57:30 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <9307020037.AA26116@grebyn.com> from "Logical Language Group" at Jul 2, 93 03:22:48 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 2099
> The vocabulary substitution or relexification is minor or not minor,
> depending on how you look at it. We completely reinvented the word list,
> and made some minor changes in morphology, but some 42 of the 900 words on
> JCBs lists when we started did not change, since the algorithm was the same,
> and in those cases, so was the data (the wieghtings did change, since JCBs
> weights were based on 1950 speaker populations). In natural languages, a
> complete substitution of words would probably mean that you would call them
> two separate languages, except that this never happens in natlangs.
Well, as the person who applied the term "relexification" to what happened
between Institute Loglan and Lojban, I suppose I should weigh in. The term
"relexification" is in fact the technical jargon of pidginists/creolists,
and the process does happen in natlangs, specifically creoles. As Jacques
Guy has pointed out on this list, Bislama (of Vanuatu) is a typical
Vanuatuan language grammatically and semantically, but which uses word forms
that are derived mostly from English.
On the Atlantic side, there are creoles which use "kaba" (from Portuguese)
as a perfective marker, and other closely related ones which use "done"
(from English). In fact, a chain of mutually intelligible pairs of dialects
can be built up which leads from Standard English to Standard Portuguese.
For that matter, English itself experienced a massive relexification at the
time of the Norman Conquest. A good deal of what makes Old English hard to
read (as opposed to hard to write) is the heavy use of native words and
native compounds that have been totally replaced by French or Latin forms.
(How many people realize that the ordinals "first" and "third" are native,
but "second" is a borrowing?) The grammar of OE is also quite different
from that of NE, of course, but grammatical differences often are no real
barrier to mutual intelligibility (Bulgarian vs. Serbo-Croat or Punjabi
vs. Hindi, e.g.).
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban.
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Jul 13 11:51:29 1993
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 10:51:20 +0100
Message-Id: <16281.199307130951@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
: In the former, the player's hands are on
: the piano, but the sentence pattern may have been reanalyzed to put the
: song on the piano. Does that account for "on the radio"? Perhaps "words
: on paper" was generalized in English to "message on medium".
What about German "auf Englisch" (lit., "on English") to mean "in English"?
(Interestingly, the only language I can think of that uses an instrumental form
to indicate language is Japanese, where, for "in English," one would use
"Eigo-de," lit. "by means of English.")
Attempts to argue the idiomatic uses of prepositions (or their equivalents)
in different languages are doomed to failure.
That the players hands are on the piano is neither here nor there, as this
is, as was pointed out, a particular case of the general use of 'on' to
designate the instrument by which some creation is realised - not just
music (on the piano/saxophone/radio) but also text (on a typewriter/
computer). It apparently does have to be some sort of machine, though:
(I drew it *on a pencil).
Arguably both Latin (latine) and Turkish (tu"rkc,e), in which the phrase is
adverbial, are using instrumental forms.
Note also that in Japanese 'de' has an alternative, locative meaning, but
only with verbs of activity, not those of position:
watasi no heya ni/*de imasu = I am in my room
but
watasi no heya *ni/de tabete imasu = I am eating in my room
Is it settled that "eigo de" is instrumental and not (metaphoric) locative?
I don't know.
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
========================================================================
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Jul 13 12:08:57 1993
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 11:08:55 +0100
Message-Id: <17033.199307131008@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
One more tidbit on 'on the piano':
"Yum Yum: Oh, this is Nanki-Poo, who used to play so
beautifully on the ... on the ...
Pitti Sing: On the Marine Parade.
Yum Yum: Yes, I think that was the name of the instrument."
The Mikado, Sir W.S.Gilbert
(Not sure if this is anacoluthon, or maybe you could call
it a prolapsed zeugma!)
Colin
>From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Tue Jul 13 14:18:44 1993
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 14:17:10 +0200
Content-Identifier: Multi-Conlang...
From: " (Richard Kennaway)"
Message-Id: <12773.9307131217@sys.uea.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Multi-Conlang Dictionary
X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5
What is the current state of the MCD? I just looked on the PLS but it
isn't there.
-- ____
Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia
uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
>From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Tue Jul 13 20:19:38 1993
Message-Id:
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 10:13:46 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <9307112335.AA28482@netcom3.netcom.com> from "D. Anton Sherwood" at Jul 12, 93 02:23:12 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 1423
D. Anton Sherwood writes:
> There are
> more preposition senses than preposition words, and different languages
> bundle them differently.
[...]
> Does avoiding
> metaphor mean inventing new prepositions, as technology requires us to
> express new meanings?
The solution, it seems to me, is not to try to create a closed class of
"prepositions" at all. Although Lojban/Loglan does not fit regular
Indo-European grammatical categories very well, the nearest analogue to
prepositions is considered an open class, and the semantics of these
prep-like words is closely tied to corresponding content words. Thus
the main word for "under" is a content word meaning "X is beneath Y
(in reference frame Z)", and the related preposition is semantically tied
to it, almost to the point of being considered a mere abbreviation.
>From what I understand, the tying is much closer in Lojban than in other
varieties of Loglan; Lojban also has explicit machinery for converting
content words to prepositions by prefixing a particle. For example, in:
mi viska do fi'o kanla ti
I see you with-eye this-thing
the sequence "fi'o kanla" is serving grammatically as the head of the PP
"with-eye this-thing", so "with-eye" becomes a nonce preposition. The
pragmatics of this, of course, is that the speaker is blind in the other eye.
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban.
>From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Tue Jul 13 20:19:55 1993
Message-Id:
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 10:56:33 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <16281.199307130951@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> from "Colin Fine" at Jul 13, 93 12:25:38 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 902
Colin Fine writes:
> That the players hands are on the piano is neither here nor there, as this
> is, as was pointed out, a particular case of the general use of 'on' to
> designate the instrument by which some creation is realised - not just
> music (on the piano/saxophone/radio) but also text (on a typewriter/
> computer). It apparently does have to be some sort of machine, though:
> (I drew it *on a pencil).
I suspect that "on" refers to medium, not means; but with sufficiently
complicated devices, the two get conflated. Note that when talking of
media we oppose "typewriter" or "computer" to "pencil and paper", so
pencil:and:paper, the collocation, itself refers to a medium.
So there is a competition, but "pencil" by itself cannot be viewed as
a medium -- it is too clearly a means.
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban.
>From jim@mycroft.rand.org Tue Jul 13 22:43:23 1993
Message-Id: <9307132043.AA10178@mycroft.rand.org>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Cc: jim@mycroft.rand.org
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 13 Jul 93 12:29:18 +0200.
<17033.199307131008@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Jim Gillogly
Reply-To: James_Gillogly@rand.org
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 93 13:43:09 PDT
Sender: jim@mycroft.rand.org
> Colin Fine writes:
> One more tidbit on 'on the piano':
>...
> Yum Yum: Yes, I think that was the name of the instrument."
>...
> (Not sure if this is anacoluthon, or maybe you could call
> it a prolapsed zeugma!)
could call it a prolapsed zeugma... would call it a trombone!
Jim Gillogly
Highday, 20 Afterlithe S.R. 1993, 20:42
>From querist@BIX.com Wed Jul 14 01:44:12 1993
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1993 19:41:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: querist@BIX.com
Subject: RE: Multi-Conlang Dictionary
In-Reply-To: <12773.9307131217@sys.uea.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Message-Id: <9307131941.memo.97974@BIX.com>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
X-Cosy-To: conlang@diku.dk
>What is the current state of the MCD? I just looked on the PLS but
>it isn't there.
PLS?
could someone please email me the address?
thanks
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jul 14 11:27:21 1993
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 10:27:12 +0100
Message-Id: <24953.199307140927@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Wed, 14 Jul 1993 10:27:12 +0100
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: metaphor and prepositions
Thus Cowan:
++++++++++++
I suspect that "on" refers to medium, not means; but with sufficiently
complicated devices, the two get conflated. Note that when talking of
media we oppose "typewriter" or "computer" to "pencil and paper", so
pencil:and:paper, the collocation, itself refers to a medium.
+++++++++++++
But we still do not
write *on pencil-and-paper
Colin
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 16 23:30:02 1993
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 93 17:29:57 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307162129.AA01211@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Does relexification make a different language?
In Lojban one would not capitalize proper names, etc. which are marked in
other ways, thus reserving capitalization to indicate abnormal stress
in names. Since 'lojbab' is a name which was given to me in a Lojbanic
context, I don't capitalize it except in a purely English context, and
I don't capitalize it in my signature. This has the added advantage that,
since I do usually capitalize Lojban in writing, people are less likely
to confuse my name and the language name.
The legal issue as to whether the two languages are the same or different
is moot, since we satisfied the court that there is no commercial product
with the trademark 'Loglan', what people choose to call 'Loglan' is there
own business. Why I defend the right to call Lojban a version of Loglan
is a different story. I want people to know that Lojban is as good as and
probably superior to all versions promulgated by JCB, at implementing the
design goals set forth in the Scientific American article in 1960 and in
Loglan 1, that it is therefore a legitimiate heir to the name, and the
claims for that language. This means that people who read the earlier
materials and are wondering whatever became of the project, can come to us
and we can say in good conscience that we are the Loglan project in name and
in principle.
For most languages, legitimacy requires a separate identity. For Lojban
legitimacy implies continuity and unity with a tradition and goals. There
isn;t a lot to hold most aritficial language communities together, and the
Loglan project is what holds ours together, and allows us to reach out across
30-odd years to the people who wonder if anything ever came of JCB's pipe
dreams. It has worked, too, in that about half of the people we recruit
are people who first heard of Loglan/Lojban in the context of JCB's writings.
That's the high minded side of this debate %^)
The more general and interesting question, independent of the Lojban project
itself, is indeed how to tell when two conlangs have diverged to the point
of being different languages, or indeed any two languages. You and I speak
different idiolects of English, but we still speak the same language. One
person has pointed out, though, that from the standpoint of a computer, the
mere difference in spelling (not to mention actual words that differ) might
cause a computer to consider British English and American English to be
different languages.
>From the standpoint of conlangs, the question might be how much reform could
be undertaken to, say , Esperanto, before it would cease to be 'Esperanto'.
Most people would say that if the bulk of the community goes along with the
changes, that most changes would still elave the language worthy of the
name 'Esperanto'. Inthe case of Lojban, when we split from JCB, we took
probably 90% of the community with us, so we feel that criterion suits Lojban
fine.
lojbab
>From allan@elvis.tamu.edu Mon Jul 19 23:46:52 1993
From: allan@elvis.tamu.edu (Allan Bailey)
Message-Id: <9307192146.AA26416@elvis.tamu.edu>
Subject: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 16:46:05 -0600 (CDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 756
I'm curious if any of you ConLangers know of any Conlangs designed
not for International Auxilliary Language ideas (common denominators and
such) but for improving the speed and logic of thought?
I know Lojban is being designed/used for testing the SWH about
language shaping thought, but can it also be used for speed?
It would be interesting if someone could design a language like
Heinlein's "SpeedTalk" from his short story "Gulf".
Any thoughts on the feasibility of something similar or even close
to speedtalk?
--
Allan Bailey, UNIX programmer, CSC | "Freedom is not free."
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations | or: allan.bailey@tamu.edu
616c6c616e206261696c6579 | or: nefud-the-delirious@tamu.edu
>From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Tue Jul 20 02:58:14 1993
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 10:58:04 +1000
From: Robin F Gaskell
Message-Id: <199307200058.AA21265@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Abstract of paper for EJC
Cc: tosho@cix.compulink.co.uk
From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 19 Jul 93
To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List)
Subject: Abstract of paper for EJC
Friends,
Apologies for being quiet, lately. Will try to make up for it in the
near future, despite moving flat in a fortnight. Reason for silence:
needed all my energy to get a paper ready - left it to the last few
weeks. Here is the abstract; the paper, itself, is too long to
broadcast on Conlang, but if anyone wants to see how I expanded on the
abstract, please let me know. The Electronic Journal of Communication
(EJC) is an international journal, published electronically in both
English and French, through COMSERVE (comserve@vm.its.vpi.edu).
The journal comes out each month, and one edition, soon, will carry
current themes in Australian communication; I was sent a call for
papers, and decided to rise to the bait by doing a retrospective on my
involvement with Glosa. I don't know if it will be accepted for
publication, but, if so, I might be included as an example of a maverick
researcher doing his own thing in communication, here in Australia,
where there is still room for the individual to work independently.
Title: Independent Scholarship into the International
Auxiliary Language Hypothesis
Abstract: The barrier to global communication caused by
national languages is not being addressed by mainstream
communication researchers. Academic and commercial
interests, worldwide, are conducting ad hoc translation
projects based on a range of hypotheses; research into Human
Language Reform is limited, and is being conducted by
Independent Scholars without funding. This paper describes
the work of one Independent Scholar investigating the
International Auxiliary Language hypothesis using the
superior Planned Language, Glosa, as his model. Lack of
funding forces reliance on volunteers and on innovative,
low-cost methods. An explanation for the lack of
institutional research into reform of the medium of verbal
communication is attempted. The significance of Human
Language Reform for global communication is outlined.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
>From doug@netcom.com Tue Jul 20 08:13:40 1993
Message-Id: <9307200614.AA13488@netcom.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 1993 23:14:21 PDT
In-Reply-To: Robin F Gaskell
"Abstract of paper for EJC" (Jul 20, 3:20am)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Abstract of paper for EJC
>Apologies for being quiet, lately. Will try to make up for it in the
>near future [...]
Ack!
:-)
P.S. in regard to:
Abstract: The barrier to global communication caused by
national languages is not being addressed by mainstream
communication researchers.
...well, naturally not, since this is highly anti-PC. To be PC,
one must adopt the stance that every culture, every people,
and here particularly, every language, has its own unique contribution
to be made to history and to global society. Metric spaces are
anathema in this regard; there are no commensurables when all is
equal.
See also David Brin's guest editorial in Analog circa 1985 entitled
"The Dogma of Otherwise", which is bang on topic (of the general philosphical
issues of this sort of our times, not on conlangs), and quite insightful
as well.
P.P.S. I'm not even into the subject of global communication barriers,
personally, but I do see this as a PC issue these days. BTW:
This paper describes
the work of one Independent Scholar investigating the
International Auxiliary Language hypothesis using the
superior Planned Language, Glosa, as his model.
I sympathize on the one hand, but on the other hand the academic
community will wince at that "superior".
Doug
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Jul 20 18:07:07 1993
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 17:07:00 +0100
Message-Id: <15576.199307201607@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals
++++++++++
It would be interesting if someone could design a language like
Heinlein's "SpeedTalk" from his short story "Gulf".
Any thoughts on the feasibility of something similar or even close
to speedtalk?
+++++++++++
I suggest that it is feasible only for perfect communication channels.
There was supposedly no redundancy whatever!
Furthermore, I am convinced that the existence of a shared context
which allows much to be omitted is FAR more significant for the
level of brevity than any innate properties of the language.
I have in front of me a leaflet issued by the Danish National Library
for the Blind entitled 'Laes Nordiske Lydbo/ger' (Read Nordic
Sound-books (talking books). It is in seven languages.
In one of them the title reads thus:
"Atuakkanik tusarnaagassianngorlugit immiussanik
nunanit avannarlerneersunik atuarit"
It is tempting to conclude from this that Greenlandic (Inuit)
is a much more long-winded language than Danish. I suggest
that this may not be so, even though it apparently is true that
it is laborious to talk about Talking Books in Greenlandic.
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
.e'o ko sarji la lojban. | (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk)
========================================================================
>From allan@elvis.tamu.edu Tue Jul 20 18:45:47 1993
From: allan@elvis.tamu.edu (Allan Bailey)
Message-Id: <9307201645.AA06540@elvis.tamu.edu>
Subject: Re: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 11:45:00 -0600 (CDT)
In-Reply-To: <15576.199307201607@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> from "Colin Fine" at Jul 20, 93 06:24:19 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 2018
>
>I suggest that it is feasible only for perfect communication channels.
>There was supposedly no redundancy whatever!
>
>Furthermore, I am convinced that the existence of a shared context
>which allows much to be omitted is FAR more significant for the
>level of brevity than any innate properties of the language.
>
So the model of the universe/reality that is "assumed" by the language
is used in its brevity?
>"Atuakkanik tusarnaagassianngorlugit immiussanik
>nunanit avannarlerneersunik atuarit"
>
>It is tempting to conclude from this that Greenlandic (Inuit)
>is a much more long-winded language than Danish. I suggest
>that this may not be so, even though it apparently is true that
>it is laborious to talk about Talking Books in Greenlandic.
True. "Jargon" is a shortening of language where the people communicating
with it assume a certain amount of knowledge and experience in the other
to reference using abbreviated words/phrases. This is kind of like the
conversations I have with the local UNIX hackers where we just yell
the unix commands at each other. We know what we're saying. :)
But back to the original question. Could an optimal language be
designed in such a way that its words/sentences/etc could be
as minimally brief as possible? And in relation to that, would
this language affect the user's thought structure/speed?
Loglan/Lojban is being designed to test the Sapir Whorf hypothesis that
language affects the shape/limits of thought. I guess it's assumed that
it will improve or incline the users to "think logically".
Is the limit of a linguistic tool's (ie, language) ability to
shape/limit/modify a person's thoughts limited by it's reality/universe
assumptions?
Or, is the kludginess of English a detriment to civilization? :-)
--
Allan Bailey, UNIX programmer, CSC | "Freedom is not free."
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations | or: allan.bailey@tamu.edu
616c6c616e206261696c6579 | or: nefud-the-delirious@tamu.edu
>From doug@netcom.com Tue Jul 20 19:24:56 1993
Message-Id: <9307201725.AA01718@netcom4.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 10:25:36 PDT
In-Reply-To: Colin Fine
"Re: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals" (Jul 20, 6:19pm)
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals
>[Re: speedtalk]
>I suggest that it is feasible only for perfect communication channels.
>There was supposedly no redundancy whatever!
One need not drop the line of thought at this point. Modern modems
have picked up a great deal of speed over those of a decade ago by
pushing hard on exactly this encoding issue.
The best (fastest & most reliable) ones today use a spread spectrum
approach, where they use a range of simultaneous channels, each one
employing an error detection code. If the communication line happens
to be very clean, then the overall bandwidth approaches theoretical
maximum levels.
If noise appears, it tends to be uneven in its distribution over
channels (it is not "white"), so that even if one channel becomes
unusable because of the noise, the other channels continue to carry
useful information. Also I believe that each channel uses increasing
redundancy of encoding as the local noise increases (if they don't,
they should.)
The overall effect is that communication is statistically very reliable,
and is as fast as noise levels allow. Since the noise is *usually* not
very bad, most of the time you get high transmission rates, and when
that's not the case, well, you do as best as information theory allows
(to a good approximation).
These modems also compress data streams when possible, but that is
literally a matter of removing redundancy from the transmitted information,
and we were assuming that speedtalk had no redundancy to start with.
On the other hand, this is a highly debatable claim, since arbitrary
communications may include repeated *semantics*, which then require dynamic
recoding (compression) in order to avoid redundancy in the transmitted
stream. This is just to say that a fixed lexicon Speedtalk would have
some redundancy in some communications, or alternately that if it has
no redundancy then it would have to have a locally variable encoding
of its lexicon.
>From the above point of view it seems clear that there is no information
theoretical reason to despair of designing a Speedtalk. The peak bandwidth
of a Speedtalk could be quite high (approximately that of modern modems,
by no coincidence at all: phone lines are designed to have approximately
the bandwidth of the human voice) and as reliable as necessary even in
the presence of noise.
An encoding system of this sort would certainly put a lot of demands on
the speakers of Speedtalk, on the other hand. But hey, in Gulf, the
speakers were superhuman, so what the hell.
Doug
>From allan@elvis.tamu.edu Tue Jul 20 19:58:55 1993
From: allan@elvis.tamu.edu (Allan Bailey)
Message-Id: <9307201758.AA00963@elvis.tamu.edu>
Subject: philosophical pondering...
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 12:58:48 -0600 (CDT)
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 385
Is it possible to create a language _without_ embedded cultural
assumptions/words/concepts?
I tried to imagine a language without the word for "chair"...
--
Allan Bailey, UNIX programmer, CSC | "Freedom is not free."
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations | or: allan.bailey@tamu.edu
616c6c616e206261696c6579 | or: nefud-the-delirious@tamu.edu
>From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Wed Jul 21 03:43:38 1993
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 09:20:08 +1000
From: Robin F Gaskell
Message-Id: <199307202320.AA03970@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Letter from China | Esp.
Cc: tosho@cix.compulink.co.uk
From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 19 Jul 93
To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List)
Subject: Haitao letter | Esp.
Friends,
I wish to share with you extracts from a letter sent to me by LIU
Haitao, who is a Chinese researcher in the far West of China, near
Tibet. He contacted the Glosa authors, and they passed his details on
to me. Haitao's letter is in Esperanto, because, of the `European'
languages he knows, this is the one he feels most comfortable with.
To be clear about his message, I had to laboriously translate from
Esperanto into English. Then, when I felt I had understood his letter,
I translated it from English into Glosa; in my reply I included both my
English and Glosa renditions of his Esperanto original. Not something
you read about every day: translating between two Planned Languages,
using a national language as the `bridge.'
I will send the three renditions, of the extracts from Haitao's letter,
in three sepate postings. I do this with the thought that some of you
will, like Haitao, compare his Esperanto with my Glosa ... having
English as the adjudicator.
Sneakily also, I wish to show that some very interesting thinking ...
namely the combination of the IAL concept with that of NLP, is going on
at a level much higher than mine, and in a place that is even further
from civilisation than Australia. Is anyone else in Languageland doing
IAL/NLP research, or is Haitao the only one in the whole world, putting
these two ideas together?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Haitao extract | Esperanto
1. Glosa certe posedas GRAMATIKON, kiu implikasen fiksa vort-ordo kaj
kelkdekoj da funcia vorto. Iusignife la sintakso tre similas kun mia
patra lingvo (C^inlingvo). C^u vi konas c^inlinvon? Atentindas, ke la
aparta formo de c^inlingva vorto intime dependas de sia sintakso.
2. Jes nun en la tuta mondo nur nemultaj fakultoj serioze studas la
rilatojn inter interlingvistiko kaj NLP. Fakte IAL eble donus novan
esperon al malfacilego de NLP, lau^ mia modesta esploro. La fakto, ke
oni ne faris la parsilo (parser) de Glosa, eblas pro nur tre malmultaj
homoj komprenas la novan planlingvon. Lau^ mia sperto kaj scio pri NLP
de c^inlingvo Glosa eble ne estas tre facile analizata per komputilo.
C^ar kvankum multaj fakultoj prilaboras la parsilon de c^inlingvo, neniu
bone sukcesas pro nia lingvo mankas al eksplika sintaksa marko, kiun
sammaniere Gloa ankau^ ne posedas. Vers^ajnas, ke en sintaksa parsilo
de c^inlingvo kaj Glosa oni devas multe uzi semantikan informon, tiu c^i
vere ne estas facila al nuntempa komputilo.
3. Kompreneble mi konas la projekton DLT, por kiu mi iam laboris kiel
eksterkunlaboranto. Bedau^rinde la projekto nun c^esis. Se kiel scia
reprezenta ilo Glosa eble pli tau^ga ol Esperanto, sed la sintaksa marko
de Esperanto certe tre utilas al komputila parsado. ............
4. Lau^ mia modesta esploro IAL ne nur povas funkcii kiel interlingvo
en perkomputila tradukado, g^i ankau povas roli en aliaj kampoj de
NLP, ekz-e multalingva databazo, scia reprezentilo de AI. J^us mi
publikis la artikolon nomitan "Interlingvo in NLP", en kiu mi staras
la kondic^ojn de ideala interlingvo, la artikoloeblas unua artikolo
pri la temo en c^inio. Bedau^ras, ke la artikolo skribitas c^ine. Se
vi interesas, sekve mi sendas g^in al vi. C^u vi konas la aliajn
studojn temas pri IAL (krom Esperanto) kiel interlingvo en NLP?
5. Mi kore dankas vin pro vi pretas donacial mi GLOSA 6000, kiun inter-
tempe MADTIN de Anglio sendis al mi. Mi esperas, ke anstatau^ g^in Wendy
sendos al mi aliajn titolojn, kiujn mi iam petis el ili. Mi esperas
verki iun enkondukan verketon pri GLOSA por c^ino, tiel mi esperas recevi
pli multajn materialojn pri GLOSA. C^u vi havas iun mas^inlegeblan
vortaron de GLOSA? Seeble mi esperas, ke vi povas sendas sur diskete g^in
al mi.
............................
8. C^u vi povas multe diri al mi pri via profesio kaj intereso? Eble
vi laboras en universitato, profesie interesa pri IAL kaj NLP? Eble en la
du kampoj ni bone kunlaboros. Se vi havas ajn demandon pri c^inlingvo,
skribi al mi!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please excuse any typing errors, these would be mine.
English and Glosa versions of these extracts to follow.
Robin
>From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Wed Jul 21 03:45:17 1993
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 09:23:31 +1000
From: Robin F Gaskell
Message-Id: <199307202323.AA04052@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Letter from China | Eng
Cc: tosho@cix.compulink.co.uk
From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 20 Jul 93
To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List)
Subject: Haitao letter | English
Friends,
Here is my attempted translation of Haitao's Esperanto. This is a
translation of the extracts from the letter from Haitao, included for
two reasons: it is supposed to be the national language, easy reading
version of his letter; and it is interesting, in itself, for those who
do not venture into the depths of the Glosa or Esperanto versions.
Here is someone researching on the leading edge of conlangology, as
such, he would be a leading contributor to this Mail List, if the
infrastructure of his country supported electronic communication. So,
does anyone have any knowlege of Chinese Internet subscribers? I
would like to be able to suggest ways in which Haitao could network,
if any of you have contacts in China, who might supply the details.
I suspect that their phone system is so unreliable, that both the
making and maintaining of contact would be dodgey.
I include further discussion of this, much translated, letter at the
end of the Glosa version, which follows.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE RENDITION - ORIGINAL LETTER FROM HAITAO IN ESPERANTO
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Glosa certainly possesses GRAMMAR, which depends on fixed word
order and a certain number of function words. The particular meaning
of syntax is very similar to that of my mother tongue (chinese).
Perhaps you know Chinese? Notice that the distinct arrangement of
Chinese words ultimately depends on their syntax.
2. Regarding this, now, in the whole world, even, not many experts
seriously study the relationship between interlinguistics and Natural
Language Processing (NLP). Actually, the IAL possibly gives the first
hope towards the unravelling of NLP, according to my modest
explorations. The fact that people have not made a parser for Glosa
is possible, because not many people understand that Planned Language.
According to my experience and knowlege about NLP from Chinese, Glosa
possibly is not very easy to analyse by computer. Seeing that
although many experts have worked on the parsing of Chinese, no one
has satisfactorily succeeded, because our language lacks explanatory
syntax markings, which similarly, Glosa also does not possess.
Flowing on from this, that within syntax parsing of Chinese and Glosa,
people must use much semantic information; this one truly is not easy,
at present, to computerise.
3. Understandibly, I know the DLT project, for which I laboured, in
this way, as an extramural activity, with others. Regrettably, the
project has now stopped. Perhaps, as a knowlege representation tool,
Glosa can be more suitable than Esperanto, but the syntactic marks are
certainly very useful for computer parsing. ...............
4. According to my modest exploration of the IAL, it not only can
function as an interlingua for computer translation, it can also
contribute to NLP, in particular: multilingual database; and knowlege
representation using AI. Recently, I published an article, entitled
"Interlanguage in NLP," in which I state the qualities of the ideal
interlingua; the article is possibly the first ablut that theme in
China. It is unfortunate that the article is written in Chinese. If
you are interested, later I will send it to you. Tell me whether you
know of other studies on the theme of IAL (except Esperanto), on how
interlanguage can be used in NLP?
5. I heartily thank you for your willingness to give me "Glosa 6000,"
which, inbetween time, Martin from England has sent me. I hope that
instead of it Wendy sends me some alternative titles, which I, some
time ago, requested from her. I hope to write a certain introductory
work about Glosa for China, thus I hope to receive the majority of
material about Glosa; do you have a special, machine-readable
dictionary of Glosa? If available, I hope that you can send it to me
on disk.
.......................
8. Could you tell me all about your profession and interests. Do you
work in a university and have professional interests in IAL and NLP?
Are there people in your country writing original works about NLP and
IAL? Possibly, in the two fields, we will collaborate well. If you
have any questions about Chinese language, write them to me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I certainly am an amateur in this field, but where are the NLP/IAL
professionals? Haitao is hoping that there are some, other than
himself, and he would like to contact them.
Phew, NLP in a non-European language, and Chinese, at that. Bit of a
surprise to all of us who thought that the significant work, on NLP,
was all being done in English.
Cheers,
Robin
>From robin@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU Wed Jul 21 03:49:14 1993
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 09:32:18 +1000
From: Robin F Gaskell
Message-Id: <199307202332.AA04366@extra.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Letterfrom China | Glo
Cc: tosho@cix.compulink.co.uk
From: robin@extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Robin Gaskell) 20 Jul 93
To: conlang@diku.dk (Conlang Mail List)
Subject: Haitao letter | Glosa
Friends,
This concludes the trio. The Esperanto was done by an excellent user,
the Glosa was done by me: I hope the English was neutral. This looks
like a contest, and, I suppose it is - although I have tried to avoid
antagonism on Conlang, and wish to present Language Reform as a
`united front.'
Eventually, if the race finally decides to do something creative about
its language problem, then such comparisons are unavoidable.
Politically, it might be a _play-off_ between the finalists;
academically, it could be _comparative research_. Whichever way, it
still amounts to the same thing: finding out what it feels like to run
the same information through the brain ... using different language
media. Despite Esperanto's *mass action* argument (they've got the
mass of people and publications: they should get all the action), I
expect that the majority will decide. This is the 99% of mankind that
uses no Planned Language ... and who, if one were to be adopted, would
have to learn it from scratch.
GLOSA LANGUAGE RENDITION - ORIGINAL LETTER FROM HAITAO IN ESPERANTO
English was used as a PIVOT LANGUAGE in the translation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Glosa certa habe GRAMATIKA, qi depende de u ge-fixa verba ordina
plus plura functio verba. U partikulari semani de sintaxi habe fo
simi ko u-la de mi nati lingua (Cina-lingua), posi tu pote uti Cina-
lingua? Vide ke: un ideo ordina de plu Cina verba eso depende ex mu
sintaxi.
2. Koncerne-co, nu-tem klu intra u holo munda, oligo tekno-pe serioso
stude u relatio inter inter-lingua-stude e u Natura Lingua Procesa
(NLP). Aktuali, un IAL posi dona u prima spe pro u devolve de NLP -
akorda mi modesti explora. U faktu: ke plu-pe ne pa face u parsi-ru
pro Glosa es posi kausa oligo persona logi u-la Ge-skema Lingua.
Akorda mi experi e ski de NLP ko Cina-lingua, Glosa posi ne es fo
facili pro analisi per puta-me. Vide ke: anti multi tekno-pe pa ergo
ko u parsi de Cina-lingua, no persona pa sati sucede, ka na lingua ne
habe plu explika sintaxi marka; qi, simi, Glosa pluso ne posesi.
Seqe-co, ko u sintaxi-parsi de Cina-lingua e Glosa, plu-pe nece uti
mega semani info; u-ci ra, nu-tem, es veri ne facili te akti per
puta-me.
3. Klari, mi ski u ge-Distribu Lingua Translati (DLT) projekti, pro
qi mi pa previo ergo iso un extra aktivi-pe, ko plu hetero persona.
Penite, u projekti nu pa gene ge-sto. Posi, iso u ski-representa-ru,
Glosa pote es ma kongrue de Esperanto, sed plu sintaxi marka certa
dona forti auxi pro u puta-me parsi. .................
4. Akorda mi modesti explora de un IAL, id ne solo pote funktio iso
un inter-lingua pro puta-me translato, pluso, id pote kontribu a NLP,
su-toto: multi-lingua data-basi; e ski-representa uti AI. Recento, mi
pa publika un artikla ge-titula, "Inter-lingua intra NLP," in qi mi pa
deklara plu qalita de u modelo inter-lingua; un artikla posi es u
prima de u-la tema intra Cina. Mal-fortuna, un artikla es ge-grafo in
Cina-lingua. Si tu habe interesa, seqe mi fu bali id a tu. Qe, tu
ski de plu hetero stude, koncerne u tema de un IAL (excepti Esperanto),
habe relati ad u mode de uti inter-lingua pro NLP?
5. Mi kardia grace a tu pro gene prepara te dona a mi "Glosa 6000,"
qi, inter-tem, Martin in England pa bali a mi. Mi spe: ke vice id,
Wendy bali a mi plura alterno titula; qi, previo, mi pa demanda ex fe.
Mi spe grafo un ideo intra-duce bibli de Glosa, pro Cina; so, mi spe
gene plu major materia de Glosa. Qe, tu habe u speciali makina- utili,
Glosa verbi-bibli? Si id existe, mi spe ke tu pote bali id a mi, epi
u diska.
.........................
8. Qe, dice a mi de tu ergo e plu interesti? Qe, tu ergo intra un
universita e habe profesi interesti in IAL e NLP? Qe, il es plu
persona intra tu natio; qi du grafo plu origina bibli de NLP e IAL?
Posi, intra plu bi area de stude, na fu bene ko-labora. Si tu habe
ali qestio de u Cina lingua, grafo mu a mi.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Haitao really has asked to be put in touch with all of the researchers,
in the rest of the world, working on combining the IAL concept with
NLP theory. Most NLP work assumes English to be the Natural Language,
but why not Chinese or Glosa? If we do know the qualities of language
that suit it best to human minds and computer processing, then why
shouldn't we go looking for the Natural Language that implements these
qualities most effectively?
Is Haitao asking too much to find people open minded enough to
consider applying NLP methods to the Planned Languages? Who knows,
some Planned Languages might even _Process_ Natural Language better than
the national languages do.
China has a very serious problem with its national language medium
(difficult orthography, no direct relation between sight and sound,
heavy memory load in learning vocabulary, excessive time taken in
schooling - just learning to read and write, extremely high illiteracy
rate ... not to mention the translation bottleneck), and it might seem
sensible for intelligent Chinese to be searching very hard to find a
way around, or through, this problem. The Chinese, a proud race, wish
to retain their traditional culture; but also, they wish to get knowlege
flowing around their country, and between them and the world,
considerably faster than at present.
How, I wonder, can we do both ... ?
Hmm, maybe if we speak and write our national language, while having a
parallel medium capable of carrying the same information - very
efficiently - throughout our country, and to the rest of the world ...
we can have the best of both: we can maintain culture and gain
communication.
Aha! There are Planned Languages: maybe one of these will do the
trick.
We've tried Pinyin, we've encouraged Esperanto and we are reducing the
complexity of our writing system ... perhaps we are seeing this too
closely: as a national problem. If the problem is seen as a global
one, then, possibly, the world's solution will be our solution!
Maybe China has more to gain from Auxiliary Language research, and
implementation, than any other coulntry. Aha, again! Possibly China
should be in the forefront of IAL research, leading the world, and
demonstrating how it can be done!?
Haitao is a top NLP researcher, and, in seeking to broaden this work
to include the Auxiliary Languages, he is shopping. He has learnt
Esperanto, written a paper on "Interlanguage in NLP", is learning
Glosa, and is writing a monograph on it in Chinese. Things are
starting to happen.
Haitao is waiting to hear from other NLP/IAL researchers: please write
to him, or tell your NLP, IAL or NLP/IAL friends about him; he reads
English, German, French, Russian and Esperanto, but prefers to write
in Esperanto; the Internet has not reached Datong, yet, but he will be
happy to receive MS-DOS disks. Oh, yes, he asks is anything published
anywhere, in any language, on the relationship between NLP and the
IAL.
LIU Haitao
Jisuanji Zhan, Qinghai Lu Chang
Datong, Qinghai CN - 810108, PR China
I hope to be able to share with you, soon, an English language version
of his, "Interlanguage in NLP."
Cheers,
Robin
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jul 21 15:49:45 1993
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 14:49:38 +0100
Message-Id: <4773.199307211349@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: philosophical pondering...
Allen asks:
+++++++++++
Is it possible to create a language _without_ embedded cultural
assumptions/words/concepts?
I tried to imagine a language without the word for "chair"...
+++++++++++
When I told J H Conway about Loglan many years ago, his first question
was 'Can you talk about cats in it'. When I said Yes, he said he wasn't
interested - a language in which you could talk about such contingent
objects as cats was not philosophically interesting.
It's very easy (for me) to imagine a language without a word for
"chair" - for example, a language that made no systematic
distinction between 'table', 'bed', 'couch' and 'chair' just
as we make no systematic distinction between
'know' (a fact) and 'know' (a person).
Colin
>From DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com Wed Jul 21 19:32:07 1993
Message-Id: <9307211716.AA14745@atldbs>
From: DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com (DANX)
To: conlang@diku.dk (SMTP)
Subject: Re: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 93 13:05
Allan Bailey writes:
>>But back to the original question. Could an optimal language be
>>designed in such a way that its words/sentences/etc could be
>>as minimally brief as possible? And in relation to that, would
>>this language affect the user's thought structure/speed?
I recall an old scifi book which pondered the question from a second angle.
The perfect communication vehicle seems to be the written word, could a
CONLANG script be written which would increase the reading/writing speed?
The scifi book postulated a script based on Arabic script whose flowing
letters
allowed the words to flow more quickly into the brain!
Dan McGinn-Combs <>
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed Jul 21 23:42:18 1993
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 93 17:42:14 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307212142.AA07070@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: philosophical pondering...
I think that Lojban without the word "stizu" for chair (and "sfofa" for sofa)
could easily get by, since we also have the word "zutse" x1 sits on x2. A
chair is not much more than a kind of sat-on thing le selzutse, and we don't
in Lojban need two words for 'table' and 'use as a table' in out root set.
Meanwhile Russian seems to distingush between chairs and armchairs even at the
most basic langauge learning level, since most textbooks teach both words
within the first few lessons, making the distinction seem important. This
is going the other way from Allan's idea, and suggests that the concept is
subject to multiple levels of generalization.
lojbab
>From lock60!snark!cowan@gvls1.VFL.Paramax.COM Thu Jul 22 01:08:05 1993
Message-Id:
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Subject: Re: philosophical pondering...
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 17:22:19 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <4773.199307211349@atlantis.brad.ac.uk> from "Colin Fine" at Jul 21, 93 04:24:01 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL0]
Content-Type: text
Content-Length: 462
Colin Fine writes:
> When I told J H Conway about Loglan many years ago, his first question
> was 'Can you talk about cats in it'. When I said Yes, he said he wasn't
> interested - a language in which you could talk about such contingent
> objects as cats was not philosophically interesting.
But doesn't he realize that cats are metaphysically necessary? :-)
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
e'osai ko sarji la lojban.
>From prsmith@ucdavis.edu Thu Jul 22 02:31:44 1993
Message-Id: <9307220021.AA09582@bullwinkle.ucdavis.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1993 17:42:37 -0800
To: conlang@diku.dk
From: prsmith@ucdavis.edu
Subject: Re: Letterfrom China | Glo
What is Glosa?
Who created it? Where can I get additional information?
Thanks,
--Phil
Phil R. Smith
American River College
voicemail: 916-484-8393
email: prsmith@ucdavis.edu
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jul 22 11:25:20 1993
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 1993 10:25:14 +0100
Message-Id: <20976.199307220925@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Written Conlang (Was: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals)
Dan McGinn-Combs <> :
++++++++
I recall an old scifi book which pondered the question from a second angle.
The perfect communication vehicle seems to be the written word, could a
CONLANG script be written which would increase the reading/writing speed?
The scifi book postulated a script based on Arabic script whose flowing
letters
allowed the words to flow more quickly into the brain!
++++++++
The second oldest published Conlang was Bishop Wilkins'
- which we might translate
into modern English as 'A Trial System of Thoughtful/Rational
Notation'
The language was fundamentally a written one - each word
(except for some grammatical particles, which had their own
arbitrary symbols) was constructed of a particular 'genus',
a particular 'species' and where necessary a particular
'difference' - ie a three-level hierarchical classification of
ideas.
As a secondary device, he attached particular sounds to the
classifications (consonants for the genus and difference,
vowels for the species) so that they would be speakable.
But the principal form of the language was of symbols with
a choice of beginnings, middles and ends for the the levels.
------------
Are _you_, Dan, saying 'the perfect communication vehicle
seems to be the written word' or just representing the story
as saying it? If you are, I shall take issue.
Colin
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
| (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk;
.e'o ko sarji la lojban. | cjfine@gn.apc.org)
========================================================================
>From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Jul 22 16:15:06 1993
From: (Mark E. Shoulson)
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 10:14:39 -0400
Message-Id: <9307221414.AA10342@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
To: conlang@diku.dk
In-Reply-To: Colin Fine's message of Thu, 22 Jul 93 12:20:49 +0200 <20976.199307220925@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
Subject: Written Conlang (Was: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals)
Yow, I'vbe been idle on this list way too long. Busy at work...
>Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 12:20:49 +0200
>From: Colin Fine
>Dan McGinn-Combs <> :
>++++++++
>I recall an old scifi book which pondered the question from a second angle.
>The perfect communication vehicle seems to be the written word, could a
>CONLANG script be written which would increase the reading/writing speed?
>The scifi book postulated a script based on Arabic script whose flowing
>letters
>allowed the words to flow more quickly into the brain!
>++++++++
>The second oldest published Conlang was Bishop Wilkins'
> - which we might translate
>into modern English as 'A Trial System of Thoughtful/Rational
>Notation'
Somewhere at home I have some sort of symbolic conlang in printing from
what looks like 16th or 17th century by someone with a Polish name (I'm
sorry, I haven't thought of it in years and this just suddenly reminded me.
I'm sure some else here has heard of it)
>The language was fundamentally a written one - each word
>(except for some grammatical particles, which had their own
>arbitrary symbols) was constructed of a particular 'genus',
>a particular 'species' and where necessary a particular
>'difference' - ie a three-level hierarchical classification of
>ideas.
>As a secondary device, he attached particular sounds to the
>classifications (consonants for the genus and difference,
>vowels for the species) so that they would be speakable.
>But the principal form of the language was of symbols with
>a choice of beginnings, middles and ends for the the levels.
This doesn't sound too dissimilar from what I recall.
There are also more modern attempts like Ro, in which each letter had some
sort of broad meaning, so that all words that began with the same letter
(or even syllable, often) had related meanings... to the language-creator,
anyway. Or aUI, which claims to have boiled down all of thought to 31(?)
special symbols. But I have my own problems with that.
Unrelated topic, call for info: Does anyone have an address/information
regarding any current Volap"uk societies? Are there any still in
existence? I know someone who'd be interested in hearing. Let me know.
~mark
>From dean@anubis.network.com Thu Jul 22 18:48:12 1993
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 11:47:33 CDT
From: dean@anubis.network.com (Dean C. Gahlon)
Message-Id: <9307221647.AA02807@anubis.network.com>
Received: by orion.network.com (4.1/SMI-4.1)
id AA03659; Thu, 22 Jul 93 11:47:31 CDT
To: conlang@diku.dk
In-Reply-To: (Mark E. Shoulson)'s message of Thu, 22 Jul 93 16:20:20 +0200 <9307221414.AA10342@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
Subject: Written Conlang (Was: Conlangs NOT designed for IAL ideals)
Mark Shoulson writes:
>Unrelated topic, call for info: Does anyone have an address/information
>regarding any current Volap"uk societies? Are there any still in
>existence? I know someone who'd be interested in hearing. Let me know.
I, too, would be interested in knowing if there are any currently
extant Volap"uk societies. (For years, I've been signing my name in
certain contexts followed by "KNSV", standing for Kadem Nebesten
Sagama in Volap"uk (Academy for Purity of Expression in Volap"uk), but
that's the only one I know of, and since I'm the only member, it
doesn't *quite* qualify...)
Dean
>From DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com Thu Jul 22 19:20:21 1993
Message-Id: <9307221652.AA20284@atldbs>
From: DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com (DANX)
To: conlang@diku.dk (SMTP)
Subject: RE: Written Conlang
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 93 12:45
Colin Fine writes:
>Are _you_, Dan, saying 'the perfect communication vehicle
>seems to be the written word' or just representing the story
>as saying it? If you are, I shall take issue.
Well, what I am saying (I think) is that most focus seems to be on the
verbal form of a language. But if there is a way to make a language
more verbally logical such that one can comprehend a concept more
easily, then it follows that the same could be done for a script as well,
improving reading comprehension.
I recall reading about Decartes and his language of pictograms loosely
based on what he thought Chinese was doing, and other attempts to
create languages (was it DoReSol??), and these I think attempt to create the
language with the expressions of it. Since then the conlangs have
concentrated (so I have seen) on creating languages using alphabets
based on the Roman Script. We have just accepted this script by
default as the only one available it appears. Esperanto has taken no end
of grief for using circumflexes over just a few letters!
Perhaps a script could be created which would match the logic present
in conlangs.
I also not that the written word is how we can communicate here as well.
Perfect, no, but it seems to work much better than my shouting out the window!
Dan McGinn-Combs <>
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jul 23 11:55:42 1993
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1993 10:55:24 +0100
Message-Id: <16145.199307230955@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN
Subject: UK Lojfest
I have been putting off getting round to a proper invitation,
but I can at least post a definite date (I did so to cix last
week!)
LA BRITO JBOSLANUNPE'I FI'I LERO LOJBO JA SELCI'I
CU .AI SE DETRI
LI 25::9 BI'O LI 26 LA BRATFYD
THE UK LOJFEST WILL TAKE PLACE 25-26 SEPTEMBER
IN BRADFORD. ANY LOJBANISTS OR INTERESTED PEOPLE
ARE WELCOME.
I will post more details subsequently
co'omi'e kolin
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
| (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk;
.e'o ko sarji la lojban. | cjfine@gn.apc.org)
========================================================================
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jul 23 16:56:47 1993
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 1993 15:56:36 +0100
Message-Id: <28988.199307231456@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Dan answers me:
++++++++
Well, what I am saying (I think) is that most focus seems to be on the
verbal form of a language. But if there is a way to make a language
more verbally logical such that one can comprehend a concept more
easily, then it follows that the same could be done for a script as well,
improving reading comprehension.
+++++++++
There are some horrible unexamined assumptions in that statement.
Who says that 'more verbally logical' is the way to let 'one .. comprehend
a concept more easily'?
Even if that is true, does it follow that the same can be done for a script?
And even if that be true, does it make the script the 'perfect communication
vehicle'?
Sign language (I know a little about BSL, but I guess the same is true of
ASL) is a language with a vocabulary and grammar (different from English),
and it cannot be satisfactorily reduced to writing, because there are a
whole lot of what would be called suprasegmental features for a spoken
language which are a constant part of the communication: the direction,
speed and expansiveness of the sign, the attitude of the body, the
facial expression - these all have a meaning.
We are used to this in a limited way in spoken speech:
"'How do you do, Wyma dear! Our house is yours!'
"Could have frosted Wyoh with the same words, but was
real and Wyoh knew it."
-Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
(from memory)
Some of this can be reconstructed from context; some would
not be generally regarded as part of the meaning; but there is
a probably ineradicable difference between the capability of
speech and of writing.
This given, it seems hard to maintain your claim without very much
more support.
Dan:
+++++++++++
I recall reading about Decartes and his language of pictograms loosely
based on what he thought Chinese was doing, and other attempts to
create languages (was it DoReSol??), and these I think attempt to create the
language with the expressions of it. Since then the conlangs have
concentrated (so I have seen) on creating languages using alphabets
based on the Roman Script. We have just accepted this script by
default as the only one available it appears. Esperanto has taken no end
of grief for using circumflexes over just a few letters!
++++++++++++
It was SolReSol (by Timerio I think, about 1815).
As far as I know every conlang attempt up to Volapuk
worked on this principle - but they were for the most part only
concerned with vocabulary, and assumed that grammar was not
anything you needed to think about. (Interestingly, Wilkins included
a remarkably advanced Treatise on Natural Grammar as one of the
introductory sections to his Essay). They devised different
representations for their basic hierarchical classification: usually
speech sounds, but Wilkins used written shapes and Solresol
used musical notes.
Paleneo (Leslie Charteris, 1960-ish) is an ideographic script. I am
full of admiration for people who try to use it for communication. My
impression is that he devised it for keeping his diaries - it probably
worked very well - and only his fame (author of The Saint books)
got it published. I may be wrong though.
You seem to be talking on about three levels at once. Wilkins' Real
Character, and Paleneo, are attempts at creating a written conlang:
a spoken form is secondary or absent. There is little attempt to
represent grammatical structure.
Most conlang inventors assume a straightforward mapping between
speech and writing, and take the most common tools to hand for
the notation. (They almost always take as a basic assumption - usually
explicitly - that there is to be a one-to-one correspondence between
the symbols and the phonemes).
Finally, the particular choice of letters and accents to be used in a
language is, I suggest, a very superficial issue.
++++++++++
Perhaps a script could be created which would match the logic present
in conlangs.
++++++++++
Perhaps. I am not quite sure what you mean by 'logic'.
++++++++++
I also not that the written word is how we can communicate here as well.
Perfect, no, but it seems to work much better than my shouting out the window!
++++++++++
But you'd find it inconvenient if, like some motor-disabled people, you
could not speak at all. Speech and writing are different: they
have different spheres of application, different strengths and
weaknesses, and in fact different languages (even, I venture to
suggest, in conlangs).
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
| (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk;
.e'o ko sarji la lojban. | cjfine@gn.apc.org)
========================================================================
>From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Mon Jul 26 18:11:24 1993
From: (Mark E. Shoulson)
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 12:11:01 -0400
Message-Id: <9307261611.AA15844@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
Subject: Lojban data on PLS
I really have to apologize to lojbab and the other Lojbanists; somehow the
latest lists which he mailed me slipped through the cracks. I was sure
that either I didn't receive them or else I'd put them up already, and then
I found them kicking around in my mail-file. Ooops. Sorry. I've put up
the latest cmavo and gismu lists on the PLS now, and deleted the old gismu
list (whose baseline is no longer valid anyway). You can get them by
sending email to langserv@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu with the following lines:
send lojban cmavo
send lojban gismu
Have fun.
~mark
>From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Mon Jul 26 18:58:30 1993
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 18:57:54 +0200
X400-Originator: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk
Content-Identifier: Re: Written C...
From: " (Richard Kennaway)"
Message-Id: <6861.9307261657@sys.uea.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5
Colin writes:
>Paleneo (Leslie Charteris, 1960-ish) is an ideographic script. I am
>full of admiration for people who try to use it for communication. My
>impression is that he devised it for keeping his diaries - it probably
>worked very well - and only his fame (author of The Saint books)
>got it published. I may be wrong though.
I recently got a copy of Charteris's book, and was going to post a message
about it. In fact, I've already composed the message, but it's on my
portable at home. (I'm posting this message so that when I see it
tomorrow, it will remind me that I forgot to post it tonight. :-)) The
book was recently reprinted -- I'll include access details.
In the meantime: According to Charteris, the language originally developed
in an ad-hoc way for his own diary and note-taking. Then one day he
realised that he was in effect developing a language, and undertook a
conscious design. It includes (deliberately) signs for all the words of
Basic English, and others.
Two signs, as well as I can render them in this medium:
_______ _______
| |/
| |
| |
/ /
cliff edge
"Cliff", btw, is taken directly from Chinese.
-- ____
Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia
uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
>From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Mon Jul 26 22:32:38 1993
From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk)
Message-Id: <9307262030.AA17995@brick.purchase.edu>
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 16:30:47 EDT
In-Reply-To: <28988.199307231456@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>; from "Colin Fine" at Jul 23, 93 5:30 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Colin Fine says:
[...]
: It was SolReSol (by Timerio I think, about 1815).
[...]
: and Solresol
: used musical notes.
You're right about the name of the language, but not about that of its creator.
Solresol was created by Franc,ois Sudre; Timerio is a conlang, not a person.
Timerio's distinctive feature, as far as I know, is that is uses numbers (I
presume in much the same way that Solresol uses notes, but I don't know for
sure).
: Paleneo (Leslie Charteris, 1960-ish) is an ideographic script. I am
: full of admiration for people who try to use it for communication. My
: impression is that he devised it for keeping his diaries - it probably
: worked very well - and only his fame (author of The Saint books)
: got it published. I may be wrong though.
Do you know of any way I can find out more about this (and Wilkins' Real
Character -- has his book been reprinted)? This is right up my alley.
Later,
--
===============================================================================
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E.
| |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick.
|_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu
| SUNY Purchase
===============================================================================
>From DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com Mon Jul 26 23:32:05 1993
Message-Id: <9307262112.AA26080@atldbs>
From: DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com (DANX)
To: conlang@diku.dk (SMTP)
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 93 17:00
Colin Fine writes:
>Who says that 'more verbally logical' is the way to let 'one .. comprehend
>a concept more easily'?
>Even if that is true, does it follow that the same can be done for a script?
>And even if that be true, does it make the script the 'perfect communication
>vehicle'?
I agree with you. I think that there is some doubt that a 'verbally logical'
language can let someone 'comprehend a concept more easily.' But there
does appear that there is an emphasis on creating languages which conform
to logic (of one kind or another:)). What is the purpose of that type of
effort
if not to allow for easier communications? What is communications, but the
transmission of a series of concepts?
I also would agree that the use of ASL/BSL indicate that there are nuances of
concepts which defy the written form, Heinlein notwithstanding! And I don't
think
we will ever see writing supplant the verbal forms, body language and voice
inflection.
Colin Fine writes:
>Most conlang inventors assume a straightforward mapping between
>speech and writing, and take the most common tools to hand for
>the notation. (They almost always take as a basic assumption - usually
>explicitly - that there is to be a one-to-one correspondence between
>the symbols and the phonemes).
Exactly. The most common tool (the alphabet chosen) may not be the best.
In fact, the most common tool for communication world wide is English.
For what purpose should we consider building any other language? For the
same reasons, I propose an alphabet.
>Finally, the particular choice of letters and accents to be used in a
>language is, I suggest, a very superficial issue.
In the Tolkien books, the script chosen for Elvish writing was interesting,
and perhaps superficial, but the comment was made that to the users
of that script the hodge-podge of the English characters would make no sense.
The form of 'm' and 'n' being at least close enough to suggest some common
bond (nasal). But the other characters appear to be chosen at random. The
thought struck me that we do make assumptions about script which we would
never make about the grammar, syntax or even facial expressions.
>Speech and writing are different: they
>have different spheres of application, different strengths and
>weaknesses, and in fact different languages (even, I venture to
>suggest, in conlangs).
Hmmmm... I hadn't considered that speech and writing are different languages.
That puts quite a spin on the whole concept. So we have not only
LOGLAN and LOJBAN but also LOGLAN/S (spoken) and LOJBAN/W (written).
Is that relexification, too? :>) <---- (written facial expression).
Dan McGinn-Combs <>
>From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Mon Jul 26 23:45:20 1993
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1993 23:45:09 +0200
X400-Originator: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk
X400-Recipients: conlang@diku.dk
X400-Mts-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<19865.9307262145@zen.sys.uea.ac]
X400-Content-Type: P2-1984 (2)
Content-Identifier: Paleneo book
From: Richard Kennaway
Message-Id: <19865.9307262145@zen.sys.uea.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Paleneo book
I recently acquired a copy of Leslie Charteris' book "Paleneo: A
Universal Sign Language". (Published for Interlit A.G. by Hodder &
Stoughton, London. First published 1972, 2nd impression 1992. ISBN
0-340-16454-9. Available from The Saint Club, c/o Arbour Youth Centre,
Shandy Street, Stepney, London E1 4ST at 5 pounds, including postage
within the UK. I don't know what the overseas price would be, but it
weighs about 240gm, which may give an idea of postage costs.) The late
Leslie Charteris is better known as the author of the "Saint" series of
thriller/detective stories.
A description of the language occupies the first 44 pages of the book.
The remaining hundred or so is a vocabulary list. The vocabulary includes
the whole of Basic English and more.
Paleneo originated in the system of shorthand and abbreviations which
Charteris had evolved in an ad hoc manner for note-taking. As it grew
larger and larger, he eventually decided to do a complete redesign,
before he lost track of it. At this point he realised that he was in
effect developing a language. It is a pictographic language, intended to
provide a universal means of communication. Different nationalities will
pronounce the language using their own spoken words for the symbols of
Paleneo, but they will be able to communicate in writing.
The name derives from the Greek words for "old" and "new".
Paleneo uses symbols that are already in wide use whenever possible. For
example, it uses the Arabic numbers, basic mathematical symbols like
"plus" and "therefore", and the symbol for "stop" is the
triangle-in-circle that appears on European road signs. Letters are not
used, except for a few cases where the particular use is already common,
such as "s" to indicate plurals.
Paleneo is written from left to right. A felt-tip pen is recommended for
ease of filling in some of the shapes.
The symbols are intended to be suggestive of their meaning. I can't
easily draw them in this medium, but here are a few descriptions.
"Angry" is a pair of eyebrows descending towards each other. "Cliff"
looks like this:
______
|
|
/
"Edge" is the sign for "cliff" with the cliff edge emphasized. "Loan" is
a picture of the three pawnbroker's balls. "Railway" is the British Rail
logo. "Slow" is a simple picture of a snail. "Butter" is a compound of
the symbols "top milk made solid". As the author says, this is
"admittedly a cumbersome paraphrase, but it hardly seemed worthwhile to
invent and memorize a special symbol for something that is hardly likely
to be much discussed in Paleneo". In fact, "butter" is only included
because Basic English has it.
Grammar is rudimentary (as is often the case with conlangs, for some reason).
Word order is subject - verb - object - adverb. This is based on the
English order, because it seems (to Charteris) that it is the most
logical order. Adjectives may precede or follow nouns. Noun cases are
indicated, if necessary, by prepositional prefixes: "to" (right-arrow),
"from" (left-arrow), and "of" (barbed hook). Plural, as mentioned above,
is indicated by a suffixed "s". There are no articles. Verb tense is
similarly indicated by prefixed symbols. Past tense is shown by a
version of the "finish" symbol, future by "going" (a pair of walking
legs), passive by "the same as" (equals sign in a circle). The last is
justified by the fact that many European languages form the passive by
using "to be" as an auxiliary.
Paleneo is intended to be used very literally, for the simple conveying
of information, not for "flights of poetry or abstruse philosophy".
Thus, in Charteris' words:
"To translate anything into Paleneo, you may have to re-word it, to avoid
any slang or highly idiomatic phrases that would be incomprehensible to a
foreigner if they were transliterated word for word. You should reduce
your material to its bare bones, thinking in terms that a child could
understand. Gobbledegook cannot be translated into Paleneo -- which may
be a priceless criterion." ... "The writer in Paleneo will not be able to
hide in a massive smoke-screen of ponderous polysyllables: he will have
to think out and reveal what he is really getting at, and the reader of
his Paleneo will not be easily bamboozled."
In response to the anticipated objection that Paleneo is just a form of
pidgin English, he replies simply, "So what?" Paleneo is first of all a
device to facilitate simple, practical communication, rather than a
linguistic work of art, and whether it is classed as a pidgin, a code, or
a language is unimportant.
-- ____
Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia
uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Jul 27 11:24:50 1993
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1993 10:24:46 +0100
Message-Id: <2266.199307270924@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: 'Down with grammar!' (Was: Paleneo book)
Richard Kennaway remarks (of Paleneo):
> Grammar is rudimentary (as is often the case with conlangs, for some reason).
(and I made a similar remark last week)
I believe that the cheif reason is that most Conlang inventors are linguistically
both untrained and naive, and have no understanding of what grammar is.
The latin tradition in Europe has ensured that centuries of dabblers (and,
formerly, learned people) believed that grammar was 'endings' - so if you
invented a language which didn't have endings, you had done away with grammar,
making your language much 'easier'.
Colin
>From jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk Tue Jul 27 14:15:53 1993
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1993 14:15:22 +0200
X400-Originator: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk
X400-Recipients: conlang@diku.dk
X400-Mts-Identifier: [/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/;<12965.9307271215@sys.uea.ac.uk>]
X400-Content-Type: P2-1984 (2)
Content-Identifier: Re: 'Down wit...
From: " (Richard Kennaway)"
Message-Id: <12965.9307271215@sys.uea.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: 'Down with grammar!'
X-Sender: jrk@139.222.1.5
Colin Fine writes:
>I believe that the cheif reason is that most Conlang inventors are
>linguistically both
>untrained and naive, and have no understanding of what grammar is.
>The latin tradition in Europe has ensured that centuries of dabblers (and,
>formerly,
>learned people) believed that grammar was 'endings' - so if you invented a
>language which didn't have endings, you had done away with grammar,
>making your language much 'easier'.
I must admit I've always preferred conlangs which had word-order-based
grammar and no inflections. (The baroque convolutions of such as Sir
Thomas Urquhart have a certain appeal, but mainly as a jeu d'esprit.) I
now realise that's probably because my first language -- English -- has a
word-order-based grammar and few inflections.
Do we have here any native speakers of languages at the other extreme, with
very free word-order and many inflections? What sort of conlangs do they
find easy to get on with?
-- ____
Richard Kennaway __\_ / School of Information Systems
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \ X/ University of East Anglia
uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Tue Jul 27 14:41:55 1993
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1993 13:41:47 +0100
Message-Id: <10376.199307271241@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: 'Down with grammar!'
Richard Kennaway says
++++++++
I must admit I've always preferred conlangs which had word-order-based
grammar and no inflections. (The baroque convolutions of such as Sir
Thomas Urquhart have a certain appeal, but mainly as a jeu d'esprit.) I
now realise that's probably because my first language -- English -- has a
word-order-based grammar and few inflections.
+++++++++
He is perhaps interpreting my posting as criticising such attempts. I did
not intend it that way - I have a strong preference for isolating and therefore
configurational conlangs over inflecting ones.
My point was that many conlang inventors appear to think that once they
have eliminated inflection they have either eliminated grammar, or the
grammar becomes 'natural' and 'obvious', and either way nothing
more need be said.
Colin
>From LAWCROWN%NUSVM.NUS.SG@vm.uni-c.dk Tue Jul 27 18:46:51 1993
Message-Id: <9307271646.AA13746@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 00:42:08 SST
From: Barry Crown
Subject: Re: 'Down with grammar!'
To: conlang@diku.dk
In-Reply-To: Message of 27 Jul 1993 15:22:13 +0200 from
Colin Fine writes:
>My point was that many conlang inventors appear to think that once they
>have eliminated inflection they have either eliminated grammar, or the
>grammar becomes 'natural' and 'obvious', and either way nothing
>more need be said.
This sounds like a (not so disguised) criticism of Glosa, as well as certain
other conlangs.
Over to you, Robin.
Barry
>From I.Alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk Tue Jul 27 19:31:33 1993
Message-Id: <9307271730.AA20156@getafix.oasis.icl.co.uk>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 93 18:30:38 BST
From: I.Alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk
Reply-To: I.Alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk
Subject: Volap"uk (Was: Written Conlang)
To: conlang@diku.dk
I got the following address nearly two years ago, so it may not be current,
but could be worth a try.
Brian R. Bishop,
Director, The Volap"uk Centre,
155, Leighton Avenue,
Leigh-on-Sea,
Essex,
SS9 1PX,
England.
+44 (0)702 714 538
I.Alexander.bra0125@oasis.icl.co.uk
>From DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com Wed Jul 28 14:17:31 1993
Message-Id: <9307281201.AA19689@atldbs>
From: DANX@smtpgate.dbsoftware.com (DANX)
To: conlang@diku.dk (SMTP)
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 07:54
Colin Fine writes:
>Who says that 'more verbally logical' is the way to let 'one .. comprehend
>a concept more easily'?
>Even if that is true, does it follow that the same can be done for a script?
>And even if that be true, does it make the script the 'perfect communication
>vehicle'?
I agree with you. I think that there is some doubt that a 'verbally logical'
language can let someone 'comprehend a concept more easily.' But there
does appear that there is an emphasis on creating languages which conform
to logic (of one kind or another:)). What is the purpose of that type of
effort
if not to allow for easier communications? What is communications, but the
transmission of a series of concepts?
I also would agree that the use of ASL/BSL indicate that there are nuances of
concepts which defy the written form, Heinlein notwithstanding! And I don't
think
we will ever see writing supplant the verbal forms, body language and voice
inflection.
Colin Fine writes:
>Most conlang inventors assume a straightforward mapping between
>speech and writing, and take the most common tools to hand for
>the notation. (They almost always take as a basic assumption - usually
>explicitly - that there is to be a one-to-one correspondence between
>the symbols and the phonemes).
Exactly. The most common tool (the alphabet chosen) may not be the best.
In fact, the most common tool for communication world wide is English.
For what purpose should we consider building any other language? For the
same reasons, I propose an alphabet.
Colin Fine writes:
>Finally, the particular choice of letters and accents to be used in a
>language is, I suggest, a very superficial issue.
In the Tolkien books, the script chosen for Elvish writing was interesting,
and perhaps superficial, but the comment was made that to the users
of that script the hodge-podge of the English characters would make no sense.
The form of 'm' and 'n' being at least close enough to suggest some common
bond (nasal). But the other characters appear to be chosen at random. The
thought struck me that we do make assumptions about script which we would
never make about the grammar, syntax or even facial expressions.
Colin writes fine:
>Speech and writing are different: they
>have different spheres of application, different strengths and
>weaknesses, and in fact different languages (even, I venture to
>suggest, in conlangs).
Hmmmm... I hadn't considered that speech and writing are different languages.
That puts quite a spin on the whole concept. So we have not only
LOGLAN and LOJBAN but also LOGLAN/S (spoken) and LOJBAN/W (written).
Is that relexification, too? ;>) <---- (written facial expressions)-->.
Dan McGinn-Combs <>
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jul 28 16:34:14 1993
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 15:04:04 +0100
Message-Id: <2823.199307281404@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
Received: from Colin Fine's Macintosh (colin_fine.comp.brad.ac.uk) by atlantis.brad.ac.uk; Wed, 28 Jul 1993 15:04:04 +0100
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Thus Dan:
++++++++++>
.... But there
does appear that there is an emphasis on creating languages which conform
to logic (of one kind or another:)). What is the purpose of that type of
effort
if not to allow for easier communications? What is communications, but the
transmission of a series of concepts?
>+++++++++
Well, in the case of Loglan (in either version) that was not the purpose. The
purpose originally was as an experimental tool. Now the purpose is multifarious,
but 'easier communications' is I think held as a purpose only in a rather
unobvious way. Like most a priori languages it may make communication
easier in the sense that concepts may be conveyed more precisely,
but that does not entirely correspond to what most people would understand
by 'easier' communication.
++++++++>
Exactly. The most common tool (the alphabet chosen) may not be the best.
In fact, the most common tool for communication world wide is English.
For what purpose should we consider building any other language? For the
same reasons, I propose an alphabet.
>++++++++
But what is 'best'?
You are right that few conlangers have seriously proposed non-roman
scripts, and that roman script has some distinct problems. However,
the problems are in my view in the history and associations (such that
letters 'c' and 'q' in particular have no obvious rendition). I am not much
impressed with attempts to reform the alphabet on 'logical' lines (like
tengwar). I suspect that you lose a useful degree of redundancy.
I once read a copy of Androcles and the Lion in the Shavian alphabet
(a phonemic script devised under the terms of GBShaw's will) - my
experience is that it was hard to keep the letters distinct in my
memory, and furthermore that looking at the text on the page there
was a great opportunity for misreading the simple, similar letters.
(lest it be thought I am just reacting to any unfamiliar script, I would
point out that I studied Russian and Hebrew in my youth, and have
since dabbled in Japanese and Georgian. I have also played at
various times with Sanskrit, Armenian, Bengali, Mongolian and Cherokee)
Having said all that, I agree with you up to a point - it is evident that
most conlangers have balked at going into a new script, probably
because they thought it would make it too daunting.
Interestingly, there is one example of a script invented on phonetic
principles in real use, and that is Korean.
++++++++++>
The
thought struck me that we do make assumptions about script which we would
never make about the grammar, syntax or even facial expressions.
>++++++++
I don't understand this remark.
What I have noticed is that naive writers of language primers, especially
conlangs, often seem to assume that the script is the language.
+++++++++++>
Hmmmm... I hadn't considered that speech and writing are different languages.
That puts quite a spin on the whole concept. So we have not only
LOGLAN and LOJBAN but also LOGLAN/S (spoken) and LOJBAN/W (written).
>++++++++++
Certainly. I am certain that my spoken lojban uses fewer converted selbri,
fewer linked sumti in tanru, and more si/sa (delete last word/sentence) than
my written style.
========================================================================
There are no extraordinary people. | Colin Fine
Whoever tells you otherwise is | Dept of Computing
lying to you. | University of Bradford
There are only ever ordinary people,| Bradford, W. Yorks, England
Who do what they do - | BD7 1DP
The extraordinary thing is the | Tel: 0274 733680 (h), 383915 (w)
extraordinary things that they do!| c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk
| (cfine@cix.compulink.co.uk;
.e'o ko sarji la lojban. | cjfine@gn.apc.org)
========================================================================
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Wed Jul 28 19:22:44 1993
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 18:22:39 +0100
Message-Id: <9356.199307281722@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Wilkins' Essay
>Do you know of any way I can find out more about this (and Wilkins' Real
>Character -- has his book been reprinted)? This is right up my alley.
Richard's given you the information about Paleneo.
Wilkins was reprinted in facsimile by the Scolar Press some years
ago, but I imagine it's out of print now. I've never seen another
edition.
Colin
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Wed Jul 28 21:59:18 1993
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 15:59:09 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307281959.AA03326@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
The basic argument against going to a non-Roman script, or a non-ASCII one in
the current envioronement, si that you are limited to handwriting for
written forms, unless you get enough following to mass-market some type of
typewriter/stylus/special font software. Most people don't like to write
longhand or to read others' longhand if they have a choice, and in any case
it is hard to reach a large audience with handscript.
This may change in the future, but probably not by much. Perhaps Unicode
will replace ASCII as the limits for what characters will be acceptable in
a conlang.
Then again, the objections that have been raised about the two non-standard
'characters' in Lojban, the apostrophe and the close-comma, show that even
minor deviations from the norm will attract much more heat than is warranted.
And we even have a good reason for those differences.
lojbab
>From jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu Wed Jul 28 22:42:58 1993
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 13:43:03 -0700
From: jsp@glia.biostr.washington.edu (Jeff Prothero)
Posted-Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 13:43:03 -0700
Message-Id: <9307282043.AA08955@glia.biostr.washington.edu>
Received: by glia.biostr.washington.edu
(911016.SGI/Eno-0.1) id AA08955; Wed, 28 Jul 93 13:43:03 -0700
Apparently-To: conlang@diku.dk
| The basic argument against going to a non-Roman script, or a non-ASCII one in
| the current envioronement, si that you are limited to handwriting for
| written forms
Actually, technologies like X-windows, and the strong commercial
push for internationalization behind recent additions to it such
as the "internationalization" facilities, make this much more
practical than just a few years. Any system capable of handling
European, Chinese and Hebrew without blinking (say), should be
general enough for most needs.
I'm not convinced improving on the Latin alphabet is quite as
easy as some folks might think, however...
>From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Wed Jul 28 22:49:11 1993
Message-Id: <9307282049.AA11127@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 14:32:28 MDT
From: "Martin R. Bartels"
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Written Conlang
I can second lojbab's argument against non-Roman/non-ASCII
script. A practical, not terribly extreme example....
Esperanto has 6 accented characters:
circumflex with: c g h j s
breve with: u
While these are in the LATIN-3 codepage, not too many printers
support this in a native mode. Ditto with editors.
(Side note: Some tools are available from the network
to get around these problems. These, however
require binary downloads - something I don't
have the tools here to handle. Pity.)
While not impossible to get things done, I go through a lot of
fuss to print letters "right". ---And on inexpensive 9-pin
printers, even these are difficult. The programming makes
implementing LATIN-3 difficult, since the accents tend to
connect to the characters in unwanted ways. I implement a
font with slightly shortened characters, and accents as
separate characters - backspacing to get accented characters.
(For addresses in Europe - both Eastern and Western - I've done
all the accent marks I know about for European latin scripts.
This makes my own tools more flexible than LATIN-3 anyway.)
In "netland", there are several convensions used for Esperanto.
Probably the two most common are to put an "x" after the letter
(since "x" isn't part of the Esperanto alphabet), or the
circumflex after the letter.
BELIEVE ME! It would be much easier not to have to do this.
It is a major inconvenience. ***Certainly not enough to cause
me to "stop" with Esperanto, but easily enough to be annoying.***
IF a language with a currently non-extant script were invented,
it would be *very wise* to have a common, useful mapping to
A-Z, a-z, and special characters found in standard ASCII. This
would keep things flowing on the network, and permit the use of
the system on any computer supporting ASCII, or any "Roman" (Latin)
typewritter.
Personally, I'd just perfer to stick with a Roman script anyway.
I hope that doesn't sound too biased (because my native language
is English), but I really don't think it would be pragmatic to
move from a Roman script -- if one is interested in a conlang
which could grow into a wide distribution.
If, however, it is "just for fun" (and I'm not intending to be
unkind here...) a unique script might indeed be interesting,
be it Tengwar (from JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings") or
be it something else.
---Marty
>From fschulz@pyramid.com Wed Jul 28 23:14:17 1993
Message-Id: <9307282114.AA27408@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com>
Subject: logban '
To: conlang@diku.dk (constructed lang)
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 14:13:59 PDT
From: fschulz@pyramid.com
Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Using ' as an alphabetic character is incredibly stupid. My command
line interpreter uses ' as meaning quoted material follows. I have
commands which do lookup for lojban words and I use "h" to replace '
when I use lojban words as arguments to commands. ' is about the
worst possible character to use. I wind up seeing "h" and ' as synonyms
which is annoying. This is one of the most irritating of the lojban
design flaws. The lojban designers deserve a lot more heat for this
than they got. This is one bug that should be fixed.
--
Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com )
>From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Jul 29 00:08:53 1993
From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk)
Message-Id: <9307282207.AA15647@brick.purchase.edu>
Subject: Esperanto accents (was: Written Conlang)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 18:07:01 EDT
In-Reply-To: <9307282049.AA11127@odin.diku.dk>; from "Martin R. Bartels" at Jul 28, 93 11:27 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Martin R. Bartels says:
:
: I can second lojbab's argument against non-Roman/non-ASCII
: script. A practical, not terribly extreme example....
:
: Esperanto has 6 accented characters:
:
: circumflex with: c g h j s
: breve with: u
[...]
: In "netland", there are several convensions used for Esperanto.
: Probably the two most common are to put an "x" after the letter
: (since "x" isn't part of the Esperanto alphabet), or the
: circumflex after the letter.
[...]
: IF a language with a currently non-extant script were invented,
: it would be *very wise* to have a common, useful mapping to
: A-Z, a-z, and special characters found in standard ASCII. This
: would keep things flowing on the network, and permit the use of
: the system on any computer supporting ASCII, or any "Roman" (Latin)
: typewritter.
Esperanto has taken an good deal of beating for these accented letters. The net
conventions, to recap what Marty says, are as follows:
cx ux Probably most common; used in the Free Esperanto course
(I prefer using w instead of ux)
c^ u`/u~/u^ I've seen this on IRC and Usenet a good deal. I
toyed with this system for a while, but I thought it looked too
odd to actually use.
^c `u/~u/^u The DLT project used this one -- and boy does it look odd! I
don't like the look of words beginning with ^circumflexes.
However, net people seem to have overlooked the fact that Zamenhof himself
suggested that the circumflex be replaced by an h (ch, gh, hh, jh, sh) and that
the breve mark be omitted if the special characters were not available. While I
don't exactly like this system, I think that the suggestion indicated that
Zamenhof was attempting to solve the problem (interestingly, I have only seen
this system used in two places: in a message from (I think) Usenet a few years
ago, and in Otto Jespersen's book in which he describes Novial).
:
: ---Marty
:
:
Gxis/g^is/^gis/ghis reskribo! ;>
--
===============================================================================
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E.
| |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick.
|_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu
| SUNY Purchase
===============================================================================
>From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Thu Jul 29 00:14:03 1993
Message-Id: <9307282214.AA13740@odin.diku.dk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 15:13:58 PDT
From: Michael P Urban
Marty writes on Esperanto's accented characters as a case study
> While not impossible to get things done, I go through a lot of
> fuss to print letters "right". ---And on inexpensive 9-pin
> printers, even these are difficult. The programming makes
> implementing LATIN-3 difficult, since the accents tend to
> connect to the characters in unwanted ways.
It is useful to remember that accents provide some difficulty in
almost every language. The accented French characters, for example,
require a LATIN-1 font and appropriate software; it is only the
economic strength of the LATIN-1 (Western European) countries that
has made this less painful. Languages like Polish and Vietnamese are
in pretty much the same boat as Esperanto.
The problem is not in the languages themselves so much as it is due to
the widespread dissemination of the AMERICAN Standard Code for
Information Interchange (ASCII), which was designed for one language
and has had to be tortuously modified in a variety of incompatible
ways to handle anyone else's tongue. I sometimes think that trying to
design a conlang to conform to ASCII (or even LATIN-1) may be missing
the point. [almost irrelevant trivia: when Sequoia designed the
Cherokee syllabary of characters, he started with the Roman alphabet
and added symbols that were inverted or truncated versions of Roman
characters, so that obtaining hot-lead fonts would be practical]
Unicode (and ISO-10646) are just now coming over the horizon. The
next round of the Macintosh toolkit, as well as Windows NT, will
support it. Unicode will help a lot (though you will still need
`minority' printer and screen fonts to render all the interesting
characters), since it has code points for just about everything.
Mike
>From laibow@brick.purchase.edu Thu Jul 29 00:35:55 1993
From: laibow@brick.purchase.edu (The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk)
Message-Id: <9307282234.AA10891@brick.purchase.edu>
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 93 18:34:04 EDT
In-Reply-To: <9307282214.AA13740@odin.diku.dk>; from "Michael P Urban" at Jul 29, 93 12:28 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Michael P Urban says:
[...]
: [almost irrelevant trivia: when Sequoia designed the
: Cherokee syllabary of characters, he started with the Roman alphabet
: and added symbols that were inverted or truncated versions of Roman
: characters, so that obtaining hot-lead fonts would be practical]
Sorry, but I don't think you're right on this one. From what I've heard,
Sequoyah [sic] never learned to read Roman script. He designed his symbols _in
the style of_ Roman letters (and some of them are pretty fanciful -- one looks
like a penny-farthing bicycle (the kind with wheels of radically different
sizes)). I haven't heard anything one way or the other about hot-lead Cherokee
fonts, so can't confirm......
[...]
: Unicode (and ISO-10646) are just now coming over the horizon. The
: next round of the Macintosh toolkit, as well as Windows NT, will
: support it. Unicode will help a lot (though you will still need
: `minority' printer and screen fonts to render all the interesting
: characters), since it has code points for just about everything.
What exactly is Unicode? I've heard whisperings about it, but that's all.
:
: Mike
Later,
--
===============================================================================
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ | Marnen E.
| |/ \ \ / \ \ / \ \ | |/ \_\ | |/ \ \ / \_\ | |/ \ \ | Laibow-Koser
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |/ | | | | | laibow@brick.
|_| |_| |_| \_\|_| |_| |_| |_| \_\_/ |_| |_| | purchase.edu
| SUNY Purchase
===============================================================================
>From doug@netcom.com Thu Jul 29 06:18:20 1993
Message-Id: <9307290419.AA09816@netcom4.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1993 21:19:04 PDT
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: logban '
Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com ) said:
>Using ' as an alphabetic character is incredibly stupid. My command
>line interpreter uses ' as meaning quoted material follows. I have
>commands which do lookup for lojban words and I use "h" to replace '
>when I use lojban words as arguments to commands. ' is about the
>worst possible character to use. I wind up seeing "h" and ' as synonyms
>which is annoying. This is one of the most irritating of the lojban
>design flaws. The lojban designers deserve a lot more heat for this
>than they got. This is one bug that should be fixed.
Since you flamed, I will allow myself the luxury of a mild counter-flame:
you are being naive. There is nothing universally magic about ' or
any other character. I can sympathize with the fact that your
command line interpreter conflicts with another use of ', in this
case the lojban use, but that's as far as I go. It is simply, plainly,
and flatly inappropriate for you to blame Lojban for this problem.
It would be very slightly more appropriate for you to blame your
command line interpreter...but even that doesn't really make sense. In
the case of both the command line interpreter and of Lojban, they had
design goals that required use of various characters for various
purposes, and they picked some. No matter what each of them picked,
there are tradeoffs. Lojban shouldn't use ' and instead should have
settled for alphabetic? Why not say the same of your command line
interpreter? It cuts both ways. They both had design goals that would
have been compromised if they avoided use of '. Why pick on Lojban
as the one that should compromise? What puts a CLI at a higher status
level than a language?
You might as well complain about English using ' as a quotation character.
This can and does cause me problems with CLI's, as recently as this
week, when I was forced to add a level of indirection to a data
analysis scheme that named files a.data, b.data, c.data...but had
to then indirectly name other files quote.data, dbl-quote.data, etc.
This was part of a project involving some very, very tricky statistical
issues, and the last thing we needed were detours to deal with problems
with the CLI and files named after characters...but that's life...it makes
no sense at all to try to find a scapegoat for such things.
This is connected to a lot of very deep issues. I have designed human
conlangs, computer languages, fonts, new character sets, command line
interpreters, was involved with the design of Unicode (although I am
*not* one of the primary architects, I wish I could take credit for that),
etc, etc. I have seen the tradeoffs on these issues from every conceivable
point of view for years and years and years.
These things are far more complex than you make them sound. Again it
is very naive to simply blame Lojban for interfering with your CLI.
There is literally no panacea on these subjects. You are displaying
wishful thinking born of a lack of balance of experience on the multiple
sides of the fence.
See what happens when you flame? Flame and counter flame, it's the way
of the net. :-)
Doug
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jul 29 11:41:51 1993
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 10:41:48 +0100
Message-Id: <11567.199307290941@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: logban '
Frank schultz flames:
++++++++>
Using ' as an alphabetic character is incredibly stupid. My command
line interpreter uses ' as meaning quoted material follows. I have
commands which do lookup for lojban words and I use "h" to replace '
when I use lojban words as arguments to commands. ' is about the
worst possible character to use. I wind up seeing "h" and ' as synonyms
which is annoying. This is one of the most irritating of the lojban
design flaws. The lojban designers deserve a lot more heat for this
than they got. This is one bug that should be fixed.
>+++++++++
In a number of languages, the apostrophe is an essential part of the
orthography, and should not have been used for a special function within
the computer system. Perhaps the most familiar example is French,
where there is no grammatical alternative to l'enfant or s'asseoir.
In other languages, such as Esperanto, it is an compulsory marker for
an optional morphological form. In English it is intermediate: contractions
using it are stigmatised as colloquial and so inappropriate for writing
(but you need it if you are going to write them), while it is required for
possessives.
Thus it was the computer system designers who committed a design flaw,
not the jbofinti. It is neither a design flaw, a bug, nor 'the worst possible
character' in lojban.
Having said that, Unix etc were around by the time lojban was being
devised, and it is perhaps unfortunate that they didn't think of that
potential problem. But they were designing a Language, not a
computer system!
Interestingly, people trying to use lojban in a system that resolutely
treats ' as not-a-bit-of-text find themselves in the same position as
(say) Scandinavians who find systems may treat perfectly
ordinary letters like o/ or ae as not-a-bit-of-text.
Using a 'h' for talking to your computer is no problem - that is
what is done in the lojban grammar. But I have a significant dislike
of And's '-less lojban text.
Colin
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jul 29 11:50:03 1993
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 10:50:01 +0100
Message-Id: <11669.199307290950@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Cherokee (was: Written Conlang )
Mike Urban:
+++++++++>
[almost irrelevant trivia: when Sequoia designed the
Cherokee syllabary of characters, he started with the Roman alphabet
and added symbols that were inverted or truncated versions of Roman
characters, so that obtaining hot-lead fonts would be practical]
>+++++++++
I've never seen that advanced as the justification, and indeed I
rather doubt it. Sequoia's characters often resemble Roman
letters, but often don't, and furthermore make some distinctions
which do not come easily to English readers. For example,
two different letters look exactly like capital W's - except that
in one case the two inner bars cross and protrude to the top,
in the other they don't - both variants of W are found in Roman
fonts.
One more point - I've seen it suggested that Sequoia didn't
invent the Cherokee script used today. He certainly did invent
a syllabic script, but his letters were complicated curlicues,
much less distinct than the block ones used since. Apparently
an American worked with him and substituted the simpler letters.
I've never seen this but one place, but it was somewhere you
would expect to be fairly authoritative. I forget the author of
the paper, but it was in 'Language in the USA' by Shirley Brice
Heath and somebody else.
Colin
>From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Thu Jul 29 16:44:53 1993
Message-Id: <9307291444.AA05348@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 08:00:10 MDT
From: "Martin R. Bartels"
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: lojban ' (and written conlang - see the end)
Colin Fine writes:
> Having said that, Unix etc were around by the time lojban was being
> devised, and it is perhaps unfortunate that they didn't think of that
> potential problem. But they were designing a Language, not a
> computer system!
On the other hand - IF the people had *any* idea that lojban would be
used on computers, I would suggest that it "should" (use your own
precise definition of "should") have been considered, given that
computer operating systems were already out there.
Certainly, the apostrophe causes problems elsewhere, in other languages,
etc.... At least in English, Esperanto, and I beleive French it does
have one meaning - some characters (letters and/or spaces) were omitted.
A possible exception in English would be "o'clock", unless that was
something like "of clock". (I don't claim that to be anything but
purest conjecture! If someone knows the real story, speak up!)
Oh, yeah, don't forget the possessive: "Marty's book". I also don't
know if at some point in history that too was omitted characters, or
simply "just the way it always was".
Perhaps oddly, Esperanto uses apostrophe to indicate that exactly one
letter has been omitted at the end of a word (knab' or l' espero: boy
or the hope), and hyphen internally (sinjoro = s-ro = Mister = Mr.).
At any rate, if one were to design a conlang today, I'd still urge
consideration be given to A-Z, a-z for words - and nothing else. Just
to simplify printing, network communications, etc.... As a marker for
missing letters, perhaps (and just perhaps) apostrophe or hyphen is OK.
Doug Merritt writes:
> Since you flamed, I will allow myself the luxury of a mild counter-flame:
> you are being naive. There is nothing universally magic about ' or
> any other character. I can sympathize with the fact that your
> command line interpreter conflicts with another use of ', in this
> case the lojban use, but that's as far as I go. It is simply, plainly,
> and flatly inappropriate for you to blame Lojban for this problem.
I conditionally disagree (as opposed to a mild counter-flame :-) ).
While I would consider that you are technically correct, you are *not*
pragmatically correct. While I'm sure that there is some exception
somewhere, A-Z are accepted as alphabetics in all latin-based languages,
although some choose not to actually use all of these characters
generally, they will in foreign words of latin-based origin. (Unlike,
if a Russian word is seen in English, it is latinized.) Some
latin-based languages add to A-Z with accented characters or other
letters (thorn, eth from Icelandic, eng from Lapp...). But A-Z
provide a reasonably stable base. Apostrophe is used in several, at
least, to indicate that characters were omitted. (And, possessive in
English... :-) )
So, my conditional disagreement is simply this: If lojban (or any
other conlang) were designed in the computer age, with the knowledge of
limitiations of computers used by the masses (I realize UNICODE is
coming - but it isn't here yet for small users, and my not be for
quite a while) - and recongnizing the likelihood of use on computers -
I really must question use for "letters" of characters outside
A-Z.
If this wasn't a concern, OK, but for anything done "today", alphabet
should be considered. Given lojban's modern nature, I would expect it
to take some heat for using apostrophe as an alphabetic - WHETHER OR
NOT I AGREE WITH THAT HEAT. And whether I agree or not depends mostly
on the design considerations of the language. If it was truly, honestly
never intended to be used by people with run-of-the-mill home PCs, then
I don't see a problem - apart (possibly) from a bit of short-sightedness.
If this is coming out rude - a flame - it's really not intended so.
But I found the "counter flamette" to be a technically correct, but a
bit naive about reality. I prefer overall to keep the tone down, simply
because a) I'm not yet a lojban-ist and b) hindsight is 20-20.
I don't know that I would have done better at language design at the time.
That I say something at all is more related to the "written conlang"
thread than directly due to this thread itself.
---Marty
>From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Thu Jul 29 17:19:05 1993
Message-Id: <9307291519.AA06361@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 08:44:19 MDT
From: "Martin R. Bartels"
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: written conlangs - Esperanto accents - h or x
Marnen Laibo-Koser writes (after being reflowed ;-) ):
> However, net people seem to have overlooked the fact that Zamenhof
> himself suggested that the circumflex be replaced by an h (ch, gh,
> hh, jh, sh) and that the breve mark be omitted if the special
> characters were not available. While I don't exactly like this
> system, I think that the suggestion indicated that Zamenhof was
> attempting to solve the problem (interestingly, I have only seen
> this system used in two places: in a message from (I think) Usenet a
> few years ago, and in Otto Jespersen's book in which he describes
> Novial).
I think that it is save to say that the net people have *not*
overlooked this, but have intentionally chosen otherwise for one or
more of several reasons, generally realted to asthetics, automation,
or whatever:
---all of the alternate convensions are better than "h" for---
compound words - where the first part ends in c, g, h, j, or s
and the second part begins in h
automatic conversion (to latin 3, or any other format) is difficult
with "h", since it is a valid alphabetic used elsewhere. Since
^ and x aren't used elsewhere, they are easier to handle.
---retionale specifically for "x"---
sorting
no non-alphabetics in the middle of a word
asthetics
spell-checkers, etc...
doesn't "separate" the word on at the text baseline with whitespace
---rationale specifically for "^"---
does represent the circumflex which "should" be over the character
doesn't introduce the "x", which isn't a native Esperanto character
Certainly, I may be missing some rationale...
Personally, I think that "x" is the strongest proposal. Occationally,
one will see "h" used, however! I believe that Zamenhof was
pridominantly addressing telegraphy with "h", although adding that any
use were accents were impossible could use the "h". This is an
impression I get from what I've read in various books.
Please note: All this would be unnecessary had Esperanto started out
with merely A-Z for it's alphabet. Unfortunately, computers weren't
around when Zamenhof invented Esperanto. I'm not happy about the
accents, but (using the same criteria in my append regarding lojban ')
I can't really fault Zamenhof for this.... It still doesn't make it
wonderful.
---Marty
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Thu Jul 29 18:56:19 1993
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 17:56:17 +0100
Message-Id: <25963.199307291656@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: lojban ' (and written conlang - see the end)
Marty doesn't flame:
+++++++++>
Certainly, the apostrophe causes problems elsewhere, in other languages,
etc.... At least in English, Esperanto, and I beleive French it does
have one meaning - some characters (letters and/or spaces) were omitted.
A possible exception in English would be "o'clock", unless that was
something like "of clock". (I don't claim that to be anything but
purest conjecture! If someone knows the real story, speak up!)
Oh, yeah, don't forget the possessive: "Marty's book". I also don't
know if at some point in history that too was omitted characters, or
simply "just the way it always was".
>++++++++
'of the clock'.
The possessive is a relic of the honest-to-goodness English
genitive case (cf German des Vaters Stuhl - the father's chair),
though it is generalised from the masculine singular -es.
I don't know when it started being written with the apostrophe,
but it may have something to do with the belief (18thC I think)
that it stood for the word 'his', so you found not only
John Smith his book
but also
Jane Smith her book.
Apostrophe is used as a letter (ie with phonetic value) in
(off the top of my head) Navaho, Samoan and I think Maltese.
Not major languages in the world, no doubt, but there they are.
+++++++++>
At any rate, if one were to design a conlang today, I'd still urge
consideration be given to A-Z, a-z for words - and nothing else. Just
to simplify printing, network communications, etc.... As a marker for
missing letters, perhaps (and just perhaps) apostrophe or hyphen is OK.
>++++++++++
Probably sound advice, with hindsight. On the other hand, what's a
conlang doing with missing letters?
++++++++++++>
. . . Some
latin-based languages add to A-Z with accented characters or other
letters (thorn, eth from Icelandic, eng from Lapp...).
>++++++++++
Most, I think. Good old English is rare in having no accented letters
(and I know there are some marginal cases such as diaeresis).
+++++++++++>
If this wasn't a concern, OK, but for anything done "today", alphabet
should be considered. Given lojban's modern nature, I would expect it
to take some heat for using apostrophe as an alphabetic - WHETHER OR
NOT I AGREE WITH THAT HEAT. And whether I agree or not depends mostly
on the design considerations of the language. If it was truly, honestly
never intended to be used by people with run-of-the-mill home PCs, then
I don't see a problem - apart (possibly) from a bit of short-sightedness.
>++++++++++++
I don't follow what you're saying. Lojban was given an apostrophe for a
good reason. If they had thought of people using computers on it they
might (perhaps) have come up with a differnt solution. It clearly
wasn't in the design considerations.
'I would expect it to take some heat' sounds to me like you're condoning
that heat, but then you say 'I don't see a problem'.
Colin
>From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Thu Jul 29 19:20:29 1993
From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta)
Message-Id: <9307291720.AA148364@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>
To: lojban@cuvma.earn, conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: logban '
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Wed, 28 Jul 93 23:29:36 O.) <9307282114.AA27408@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 18:20:12 +0100
Frank says:
> Using ' as an alphabetic character is incredibly stupid. My command
> line interpreter uses ' as meaning quoted material follows.
I think h should be mandated as at least an allograph of '. I
have tried using h instead of ', but got complaints. In general
Lojban is very resistant to change, & unless you can prove
beyond all doubt that something really doesn't work, the only
way to effect a change is to adopt it yourself & hope that
others follow. In this particular case there is a chance it
might catch on.
----
And
>From doug@netcom.com Thu Jul 29 19:55:11 1993
Message-Id: <9307291755.AA24043@netcom2.netcom.com>
From: doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 10:55:50 PDT
X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.2.5 10/14/92)
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: lojban ' (and written conlang - see the end)
Martin R. Bartels writes:
> While I'm sure that there is some exception
>somewhere, A-Z are accepted as alphabetics in all latin-based languages,
The exception is in every language. What you said is not true of
any language, not even English. Consider "resume'" for instance. There
are no small number of English words that require diacritics, and
in every latin-alphabet-based language except English, *most* words
require diacritics.
But to represent diacritics in ASCII, one must use punctuation marks
such as '. 7-bit ASCII is the current lingua franca of computer character
sets, so until Unicode is widely implemented and available, that's
the way it goes.
So your argument is completely specious.
> But A-Z provide a reasonably stable base.
This is the typical response of Americans who have a myopic view
of the world because of the rarity of fluency in other languages here,
but speakers of languages other than English, and English linguists as
well, would (and do) very strongly disagree with this.
In e.g. the internationalization community, parochial statements like that
are famous for causing righteous howls of indignation from non-Americans.
I am not exaggerating at all when I say that this point of view is
considered in a very similar light to a redneck defending his use of
the word "nigger": It really pisses off a large part of the world.
I'm a native speaker of English, so I'm not personally thusly offended,
but I sure have seen others who were, many times. To use an analogy
closer to home, this is very similar to the accidental utterance I've
heard many times from Americans in calling the English language the
"human language". Always immediately corrected, never intended in
malice, but it sure says a lot about subconscious point of view.
Doug
>From urban@cobra.jpl.nasa.gov Thu Jul 29 20:04:09 1993
Message-Id: <9307291804.AA10998@odin.diku.dk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 11:04:05 PDT
From: Michael P Urban
Your message dated: Thu, 29 Jul 1993 01:22:17 PDT
> Sorry, but I don't think you're right on this one. From what I've heard,
> Sequoyah [sic] never learned to read Roman script.
(but if he never learned to read Roman script, how do you know that
his name is spelled `Sequoyah' ? :-) )
> He designed his symbols
> _in the style of_ Roman letters (and some of them are pretty
> fanciful -- one looks
> like a penny-farthing bicycle (the kind with wheels of radically different
> sizes)). I haven't heard anything one way or the other
> about hot-lead Cherokee
> fonts, so can't confirm......
Well, this shows what happens when you get your information from an
imperfectly remembered verbal conversation with a Cherokee...
Now you know why they call it Urban Folklore [I hadda say it].
> What exactly is Unicode? I've heard whisperings about it, but that's all.
Briefly, it is a 16-bit code for interchange and storage of textual
information. It is endorsed by a large number of U.S. hardware and
software companies, and will be blessed by ISO in the form of ISO
10646 (I am simplifying the relationship between ISO10646 and Unicode,
but this is close enough for the tabloids). With sixteen bits (65536
code points) there is room for fully accented Roman characters from
all the languages that use them, plus all non-Roman foreign alphabets
(hey: I wonder if Cherokee is in there?), plus Asian ideograms
(unifying Japanese and Chinese characters that are graphically
isomorphic).
It is a text interchange code, not a font coding, so it does not
contain code points for purely graphical entities like the `ffi'
ligature your typesetting program wants to use.
It is likely to become Very Important during the next several years.
Mike
>From ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk Thu Jul 29 20:10:33 1993
From: ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk (Mr Andrew Rosta)
Message-Id: <9307291738.AA27461@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: logban '
In-Reply-To: (Your message of Thu, 29 Jul 93 12:19:15 O.) <11567.199307290941@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 18:38:36 +0100
Colin says:
> Using a 'h' for talking to your computer is no problem - that is
> what is done in the lojban grammar. But I have a significant dislike
> of And's '-less lojban text.
Why? The only reason I've ever been given is from Lojbab, who
calimed that ' is not equivalent to h phonetically. This
is not a very good reason, since (a) transcribing Lojban '
by [h] *would* be approved by the IPA, and (b) not all letters
of the lojban alphabet (notably c,j,y) correspond to the
phonetic values ot the same characters in the IPA alphabet.
That said, some people who have read or edited what I write
in English take exception to non-conformity, however well-
motivated it may be.
----
And
>From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Jul 29 21:49:37 1993
From: (Mark E. Shoulson)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 15:49:21 -0400
Message-Id: <9307291949.AA04931@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
To: conlang@diku.dk
In-Reply-To: The Songbringer -- Marnen to the common folk's message of Thu, 29 Jul 93 01:19:59 +0200 <9307282234.AA10891@brick.purchase.edu>
Subject: Written Conlang
Somewhere I think I have a printout of the Sequoyah letters, maybe with
some explanation, but it was as part of that horrid Poliespo thing (a sort
of blending of Esperanto and Cherokee, which could have been cool but
wasn't, compounded by some really annoying sales-copy and legally
questionable pursuits (like pyramid schemes for joining the inventor's
organizations). I heard here on conlang some months ago that the inventor
was facing murder charges and may be executed). Not sure of how
authoritative it all is.
~mark
>From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Thu Jul 29 22:32:24 1993
From: (Mark E. Shoulson)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 16:32:08 -0400
Message-Id: <9307292032.AA05161@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: lojban '
With all this talk about lojban's apostophe, I guess I should mention the
one or two similar ones I know of...
I believe most orthographies for Hawai'ian (at least the one my textbook
uses) use ' as their glottal-stop consonant. I understand that some
important source (World Almanac? Some standard atlas? I forget who)
recently started spelling the state's name "Hawai'i", with the glottal-stop
mark. Klingon also uses ' for glottal stop, but you already knew that.
On the conlang side, a reasonably successful conlang (as conlangs go),
namely Volap"uk, actually used "`" as a letter, sounded pretty much like
lojban sounds its "'" (reserving "h" for a sound more like lojban "x", a
velar fricative). The use of "`" (in capital, a boldface "`") was one of
the earlier things dropped out of Vpk, in some conference whose year I
forget. The "h" was softened and became used in all places. I think the
case for "`" was that it was a breathing mark borrowed from Greek. Heh,
you could borrow ":" from Sanskrit and it might be easier to read... :-)
~mark
>From martyb@vnet.IBM.COM Thu Jul 29 22:33:59 1993
Message-Id: <9307292033.AA16464@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 14:07:37 MDT
From: "Martin R. Bartels"
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Written Conlangs
****WARNING: Another long post - about 80 lines****
There have been some very interesting responses to my postings,
some of which may be because I have left the wrong impression.
Please, I said:
A-Z are accepted as alphabetics in all latin-based languages
I did *NOT* say:
A-Z are accepted as the alphabetics in all latin-based ...
***
A-Z are accepted as the only alphabetics in all latin- ...
********
In short, I didn't say that accented characters aren't part
of latin-character set languages. (Latin based, to be sorter,
but I don't mean "romance" languages, simply languages using
a latin (roman) alphabet.)
All latin-based languages use some accented characters, at
least for foreign words, often for adopted "foreign words",
etc.... English, and to a lesser extent, Dutch use far
fewer accented characters than most latin-languages.
(Accented - to avoid diacritic-ed.)
Now, the non-English world frequently complains of lack of
standards, etc.... for their characters which include diacritic
marks. More precisely, the they (rightfully) lament that there
is no standard which permits interchange. There is some standard
for every language in Europe. --But perhaps not compatible with
another European country. Europe seems "mostly" to fall into
"Latin-1" and "Latin-2". Turkish and Maltese fall into "Latin-3".
Since there is some overlap in even the accented characters, some
languages (French and German) do OK regardless, as well as English.
Hungarian, Portuguese, Czech, Italian (with capitol grave accented
characters), ... don't and are limited to one of these coding
schemes.
This is a problem which deserves to be resolved. I fully agree.
I question the wisdom of adding a new conlang to the list of
languages upset by the low-level of standardisation. Hence
my advice - stick to A-Z, a-z. If you can't, you've mandated
awkward substitutions for telecommunication. More logical
script? Fine, but without a mapping to A-Z, you can't send it
to someone over the network. And accented characters, though
used elsewere, aren't standardized, hence problematic.
THAT IS MY POINT.
All of the above is quite aside from lojban's use of "'". This
is one of the few characters that actually is standard in ASCII.
So, use "'" if you want, just realize that it may have some
undesired consequences on computers. Who cares about computers
anyway? (heavy sarcasm, considering how heavily they are used
to get things printed today.) Still, it isn't nearly so big a
problem as characters not existing somewhere.
UNICODE would help this situation greatly. We need it badly for
world communication.
Please, I'm not Americano-centric. Or at least never by intent.
If I were, I would never have bothered with Esperanto. My prime
reason for learning it was that it seemed unfair for me to expect
people to learn English - a truly difficult natlang, just to be
able to talk with them.
---Marty
>From fschulz@pyramid.com Thu Jul 29 22:38:14 1993
Message-Id: <9307292038.AA23840@pyrps5.eng.pyramid.com>
Subject: contractions
To: conlang@diku.dk (constructed lang)
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 13:38:00 PDT
From: fschulz@pyramid.com
Reply-To: fschulz@pyramid.com
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
Frank, when using Enlish, how do you handle
"isn't" - or any other contraction?
I never use contractions. They look ugly to me. This is even
before I used computers, so my dislike is based on artistic grounds.
--
Frank Schulz ( fschulz@pyramid.com )
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 30 05:55:02 1993
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 93 23:54:38 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307300354.AA07815@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: logban '
Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
The main reason for not transscribing apostrophe as "h" is NOT that it is not
equivalent to "h", which is true but a less important point. The important
feature about apostrophe is that it doesn't look like a normal alphanbetic
character in Lojban, and it is not. Regardless of the formal phonetics,
in Lojban ' is NOT a consonant. Nor is it a vowel. It is a pronunciation
guide that says devoice the glide between these two vowels when you
pronounce them as two syllables. It is contrasted against the close-comma
which means the same thing but without devoicing, with the period which
means not glide, but a full (or glottal) stop, and with null, which means
only one syllable. Thus all of the possible ways to divide the word do
not appear as alphabetic characters, and the most significant contrast - between
the common ' and the uncommon , are particularly evident and easy to learn.
Secondly, the Lojban morphology is structured around certain patterns of
letters and is dependent on whether they are consosnants or vowels - as defined
for the Lojban character set. Ignoring ' , and . as "non-characters"
all cmavo are V VV CV or CVV. All gismu are CVCCV or CCVCV. All lujvo are
broken down into units of non-final CVV(r/n) CVC(y) CCV CVCCy CCVCy and final
CVV CCV CCVCV CVCCV. All names end in consonants, and le'avla are most anything
else. Being able to decide that a word is not one of the first couple of types,
and therefore a le'avla, depends partly on being able to quickly recognizing the
breakdown of lujvo into 3 and 5 letter segments, with the r/n/y hyphens at
appropriate places. Throw in an insignificant "h" and those patterns become
harder to see, and much harder to learn. Given that, for example. Frank S.
has said that he finds breaking lujvo up into pieces difficult, he may need
to concentrate on learning and looking for the patterns, at which point the
apostrophe will be seen as more valuable.
Notwithstanding this, the "h" is recognized as an alternate to apostrophe as
part of a larger system of alternate orthography that is used to make the
language look more similar to other forms of Loglan. People who are writing
in that alternate orthography are welcome to use the "h", and we will probably
come up with computerized routines sometime that will translate between this
standard alternate and the official orthography so that the rest of us can
read the text easily. (I find it difficult to read text with the "h" in
EXCEPT when it is a lower case h in all capitals, as it is in the standard
names of the selma'o (word categories), which could not use ' because of the
limitations of YACC (a unix-related computer program) and hence uses the lower-
case "h" instead.
lojbab
>From j.guy@trl.oz.au Fri Jul 30 06:07:22 1993
From: j.guy@trl.oz.au (Jacques Guy)
Message-Id: <9307300406.AA03769@medici.trl.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: logban '
To: conlang@diku.dk
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1993 14:06:57 +1000 (EST)
In-Reply-To: <9307300255.AA06869@grebyn.com> from "Logical Language Group" at Jul 30, 93 05:21:31 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL20]
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Length: 1077
> I note that apostrophe is a significant character in several non-English
> languages, including Greek, where it has a meaning similar to its Lojban
> meaning, and Arabic.
No, no, no, they are not equivalent. The apostrophe proper, in Greek,
marks the elision of a vowel, as it does in French, or in the English
"doesn't" <-- "does not". What you take as apostrophe is the diacritic
(asper) used with initial, aspirated vowels (and rho). But that is a
late introduction.
Just like the accents. Further, the absence of aspiration is also expressed
by a diacritic.
As for Arabic, I guess that means the hamza. The
hamza is a diacritic, indicating a glottal stop. It is also a late
introduction. Mohammed's dialect, in which the Koran is written, did
not have a glottal stop, and since the orthography of the Koran could
not be tampered with, its writing being holy, a diacritic was introduced
to indicate the glottal stop. In both cases, the apostrophe, the asper,
or the hamza are later "patches", whereas in Lojban the apostrophe
is there by initial design.
>From lojbab@grebyn.com Fri Jul 30 06:34:20 1993
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 93 00:34:17 EDT
From: lojbab@grebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
Message-Id: <9307300434.AA08705@grebyn.com>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Re: lojban '
In answer to Marty, when the apostrophe was added to Lojban (which was
in the first weekend of design, we were indeed not thinking of
computers. The idea was to get a rational orthography that preserved
JCB's design principles but allowed for what we saw as a necessary
change to the then(and still) flawed JCB version which is wishy-washily
ambiguous on what to do with certain vowel pairs. Some of them could be
treated as one syllable or two, and the whole pronunciation of the word
could change based on your decision, since Loglan/ Lojban is
penultimately stressed and the syllable count is therefore important.
The question of whether, for example, to pronounce "lui" as /lwi/ or
/lu,wi/ was considered important. Equally important was the qeustion of
something like "ea", which as pronounced without devoicing of the glide
is indistinguishable from the equally in Loglan/Lojban permissible (if
rare) "eia" for most auditors /e,ya/ vs /ei,ya/ where /y/ is the y-glide
and /e/ is the mid-to-high front vowel.
We did make the minimal constraint (I was a computer program after all,
though not on unix or on a pc - I USE rather than program on, the
latter, and none of my utilities except those derived from unix (none of
which I was using at that time) cared about apostrophes) - all
characters in the Lojban character set had to be typable on a standard
computer or typewriter keyboard without using a shift key.
I also, as I said in another posting, need a "non-alphabetic" character
for the non-alphabetic purpose of the apostrophe, and the ' is used for
a similar purpose in Greek, where it is pronounced like "h" in among
other things, the name of the country: 'ellas (which admittedly is
often transcribed as Hellas). The apostrophe also contrasted well with
the other non-alphabetics chosen.
In the early days of the language, ' was pronouncible as ANY unvoiced
consonant not found in the rest of the language, and at least one
non-conformist liked to irritate the rest of us by pronouncing it as
theta "th" (the language was still understandable but starnge-sounding
and difficult to all of us who were beginners at hearing the spoken
language). The reason for the flexibility is that some languages do not
have the "h" sound and do not normally hear it, one example of same
being French. We were later informed by linguists that even those
langauges that have trouble hearing h would have no trouble hearing the
sound of the devoiced glide between two vowels as distinct from the
voiced equivalent, even if they did not label that sound as "h".
I haven't checked lately, but the language definition may still permit
the theta as an alternate (which might make And the non-conformist happy
%^).
lojbab
>From LAWCROWN%NUSVM.NUS.SG@vm.uni-c.dk Fri Jul 30 06:48:08 1993
Message-Id: <9307300448.AA26353@odin.diku.dk>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 93 12:30:09 SST
From: Barry Crown
Subject: Re: written conlangs - Esperanto accents - h or x
To: conlang@diku.dk
In-Reply-To: Message of 29 Jul 1993 18:22:43 +0200 from
>Please note: All this would be unnecessary had Esperanto started out
>with merely A-Z for it's alphabet. Unfortunately, computers weren't
>around when Zamenhof invented Esperanto. I'm not happy about the
>accents, but (using the same criteria in my append regarding lojban ')
>I can't really fault Zamenhof for this.... It still doesn't make it
>wonderful.
>
>---Marty
It is truly astonishing how much heat is generated around the subject of
unconventional characters in conlangs. I have received more postings on
this issue in one day than I get in a regular week from this mailing list.
I would have thought that that fact alone was a good reason for adopting
Marty's proposal to limit any conlang alphabet to the regular unaccented
Latin A-Z.
So far as Esperanto is concerned, I remember reading in soc.culture.
esperanto that Zamenhof himself came to realise what a serious mistake
he had made in introducing the Esperanto accented characters. Apparently
he described the accented characters as "forta barilo kontrau^ la disvastigado
de Esperanto". [I have no source for this quotation and would appreciate
any further information on this. It may possibly be an urban legend.]
Bad as the Esperanto characters are in this age of computers, they were
even worse in the age of typewriters.
It is a tribute to the conservatism of Esperantists that they have resisted
all attempts to reform their alphabet. By way of contrast many national
languages have undergone orthographic reform over the last 100 years.
One interesting example is Malay, where one of the aims of the reform
was to get rid of an accented character. Modern Malay and Indonesian now
use the Latin A-Z without any accents.
If you're interested in spreading your conlang, you should really avoid
idiosyncracies such as unorthodox characters. In theory it's only a small
matter, but I'm sure that the undignified mess that appears on most people's
computer screens when they look at soc.culture.esperanto only serves to
confirm the common prejudice that Esperanto is not to be taken seriously.
[Yes, I know that Finnish looks even worse on a computer screen, but the
Finns are not seriously trying to spread their language round the world.]
Barry
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jul 30 11:18:08 1993
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1993 10:17:41 +0100
Message-Id: <22666.199307300917@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN
Subject: Re: logban '
And asks:
+++++++>
Why? The only reason I've ever been given is from Lojbab, who
calimed that ' is not equivalent to h phonetically. This
is not a very good reason, since (a) transcribing Lojban '
by [h] *would* be approved by the IPA, and (b) not all letters
of the lojban alphabet (notably c,j,y) correspond to the
phonetic values ot the same characters in the IPA alphabet.
>++++++++
The reason for me is two-fold (and they are related)
1) 'h' is a letter, and as a letter it is a consonant. Using it
in lojban distorts the CV structure
2) Therefore your -h- rich lojban distorts the (starting to be)
familiar pattern of lojban words and makes them much harder
for me to read. (I have to say them out loud to myself, or
mentally translate them, in order to understand them).
Obviously I could learn to read your format if I put the effort
in. I do not want to have to cope with variant orthographies
at this stage, and I prefer the standard lojban orthography
partly because it's standard and familiar, and partly because
it captures an important structural feature of the language
in a way which 'h' hides.
Colin
>From C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk Fri Jul 30 11:28:10 1993
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1993 10:28:05 +0100
Message-Id: <22876.199307300928@atlantis.brad.ac.uk>
From: Colin Fine
To: conlang@diku.dk, LOJBAN@CUVMB.EARN
Subject: Re: lojban '
Mark quips:
++++++++++++>
Heh,
you could borrow ":" from Sanskrit and it might be easier to read... :-)
>+++++++++++
I'd prefer that to 'h', since it wouldn't be a letter. Unfortunately, it
would still blow up our poor inept computers. ;-)
Colin
>From KNAPPEN@VKPMZD.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE Fri Jul 30 17:28:09 1993
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1993 17:25 +0200
From: J%org Knappen
Subject: Re: Written Conlang
To: conlang@diku.dk
Message-Id: <01H15TPU8QTS8WW6CW@VzdmzA.ZDV.Uni-Mainz.DE>
X-Envelope-To: conlang@diku.dk
X-Vms-To: VZDMZA::IN%"conlang@diku.dk"
Poliespo was announced some months ago on NAT-LANG and a german postal
address was supplied. I tried to order some material about Poliespo there,
but never got any reply (a pity). I still have saved a short description
file. Even with UNICODE you'll be unable to print it!
By the way, the cherokee alphabet is often reprinted in encyclopaedies,
books about writing systems etc., take the Cambridge Encyclopedy of
Language as an example.
Yours, J"org Knappen.
>From shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu Fri Jul 30 22:07:28 1993
From: (Mark E. Shoulson)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 93 16:06:57 -0400
Message-Id: <9307302006.AA10661@startide.ctr.columbia.edu>
To: conlang@diku.dk
Subject: Written Conlang
>Poliespo was announced some months ago on NAT-LANG and a german postal
>address was supplied. I tried to order some material about Poliespo there,
>but never got any reply (a pity). I still have saved a short description
>file. Even with UNICODE you'll be unable to print it!
I have a mess of info about it that Nick Nicholas sent me. I can send
copies to interested parties, but it's pretty flaky.
~mark
Text file Source (historic): geocities.com/raiu_harrison/conlang
geocities.com/raiu_harrison(to report bad content: archivehelp @ gmail)
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