Re: death of Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan

>From: And Rosta <a.rosta@...>
>Subject:      Re: death of Dr. James Cooke Brown, inventor of Loglan
>
>Lojbab:
> > TLI had almost no usage,
> > and has tended to "discover" problems from 1 to 5 years after we solved
> > them, and has almost always chosen a solution that was exactly the same as
> > ours.  This was not actually behind the scenes consultation, but rather
> > that various people looked to Lojban to see where the problems were, and
> > our solutions, and sold them to JCB while politickly not mentioning where
> > the ideas came from.
>
>Just out of interest, what are some examples of these problems and
>solutions?
I'm not sure how much conlang wants to go into this, which seems to get
asked every year or two.  An example where they have copied our solution:

The vocative for self identification (mi'e/Hue), and I believe they have
also moved in our direction on vocative grammar as well (more free use of
vocatives was actually a Jim Carter invention rejected by JCB).

Nora found a bug in the lujvo/complex-word-making algorithm, which I have
now heard that they solved in a similar way after we told them about it.

Things they haven't fixed:

negation - they have only one negation word and it is ambiguous between
contrary and contradictory negation, though certainly with a more
contradictory bent.  They also have scope problems with negation.

scope of abstraction - their event abstractor "po" = Lojban "nu" changes
the meaning of a predicate rather than abstracts a predication into another
predicate.  They have a "lepo" that abstracts a predication into an
argument, and the "lepo" "le po" distinction is grammatical, which we
considered a violation of audio visual isomorphism.

tense - JCB used simple tenses in combination to form things that resemble
perfectives but are ill-defined.  There is no published tense grammar at
all - at the time of the split, anything including non-tense stuff could be
stuck on the end of a tense word and it was grammatical.

MEX - they have no grammar of mathematical expressions but recognize the
need for same.

sumti raising - they have not addressed this issue, which for
non-loglangers is the difference between "I closed the door" and "I was the
agent in the door becoming closed", or between "I finished the dinner", and
"I finished eating the dinner" or "I finished cooking the dinner" or
between "I know Lojban", and "I know Lojban is a logical language".  In
each case an abstract sentence/predicate is concealed in an object in the
shorter sentence.

They use English idiomatic conventions in making compounds - especially
using the word madzo (to make y out of z) in causal compounds (e.g.
"finish" = "whole-make", "farm (vb)" ="grow-make").  Other examples include
the infamous "man a ship" = "man-do".  Lojban has swung to the other
extreme, with a tendency to avoid metaphorical compounds completely -
probably not a bad idea while usage is dominated by English native speakers.

There are many others, but it gets technical.  But these are all things
that we have solved.

lojbab
----
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                    703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:  http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)