Re: Rick Morneau's Katanda?

Jeffrey Henning scripsit:

> It was specifically with *your* work in mind, John, :-) that I qualified my
> statement by saying "one-man achievement".  For those of you on the list who
> haven't purchased it, you'll find _The Complete Lojban Language_ to be a
> fascinating, entertaining work:
*blush*

> I wasn't aware that James Cooke Brown had developed Loglan in that much
> detail.  My impression was that Loglan was constantly changing and that was
> why Lojban split off.
That was one factor, but not the most important one.  At the time, Brown
was claiming ownership of the language, even to the individual words in it
(after all, he made them up, didn't he?).  If every word was copyright,
there was of course no hope of individual Loglan creative writing, to
say nothing of writing *about* Loglan.  (The Loglan Institute no longer
makes such claims.)

Stability came into play later.  Lojban was designed from the beginning to
have a stable point ("baselining") after which the language would no longer
be tinkered with by fiat: that point has not yet technically been reached
according to the original model, but has now been reached de facto
("the peace of exhaustion").  Loglan has never had any such commitment, but
is also de facto stable, partly because both Brown and his chosen successor
are dead -- and *his* chosen successor is in his 70s.

The nascent Logical Language Group therefore used Brown's algorithms and
updated data to remake the primitive content words.  The function words
were also changed in a semi-systematic way (gu became ku, for example)
and the phonology was changed slightly, greatly expanding the number of
possible function words.

> How does [Lojban] compare now to Loglan from a grammatical standpoint?
The grammars are still very close, although the grammar *description* was
rebuilt (copyright again) and many new facilities were added, with a few
being removed as not really necessary.  In the areas of tense and mathematics,
Lojban is greatly extended and (I hope) clarified over Loglan.

--
John Cowan <jcowan@...>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_

Reply