Ongoing discussion with TLI rep on Loglan/Lojban and logic - 1 of 3

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

The following is part 1 of 3+ of my email exchange with TLI logician
Randall Holmes.  Since the discussion is ongoing, I will be cc'ing all
further traffic to Lojban List, and ask that anyone responding include
Holmes as an address in your response.  (There may be a part 3a which
will consist of any postings I exchange with Holmes between preparing
this message and posting it.)

The discussion started as a result of Holmes posting on
comp.ai.nat-lang, which I have reposted in a separate message.

The discussion has been ranging over several issues regarding logic and
Lojban, especially "me" and implicit quantifiers.  I am not the best person
to be discussing logic on behalf of LLG, and would welcome anyone else who
chooses to insert themselves into the discussion.

Note that messages from Holmes generally use examples in the TLI version
of the language, so the vocabulary won't scan, though "me" is the same
in both languages.  In general, translations of the examples are given
so it should be fairly easy to follow.  If not, feel free to ask for 
elucidation.

This is the most friendly and detailed technical discussion we have had
with an 'official' from TLI, and the fact that it is happening is the
best thing that has happened in a long time in our inter-organizational
relations.

lojbab


|Mail>mail holmes@math.idbsu.edu
|Subject: Lojban
|
|Of course there is a Lojban parser.  In fact, I believe that you can
|find a copy on our ftp site (along with our YACC grammar, and about 12
|Meg of other stuff), and check it out for yourself.
|
|We have several people who might comment on your question regarding
|Loglan/ Lojban and NLP/AI research.  Rather than attempting to speak for
|them, I suggest that you post your question to Lojban List
|(lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu).  Address of the ftp server is in my sig.
|
|lojbab
|----
|lojbab                                              lojbab@access.digex.net
|Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
|2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
|
|Cc: lojbab nick
|
|
|
|Message  2:
|Date: Sat, 18 Jun 94 21:34:25 -0600
|From: Randall Holmes <holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu>
|To: holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu, lojbab@access.digex.net
|Subject: Re:  Lojban
|Cc: nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au
|
|Thanks!  Sorry about "the pirate version" :-)
|
|                                --Randall Holmes
|
|Mail>r
|To: holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu
|Subject: Re:  Lojban
|
|No offense taken %^)
|
|If I took offense to everything said by a TLI supporter, I would spend
|far too much time angry.  I would rather wage peace; of course, JCB
|won't have any such thing.
|
|Haven't heard much from JCB and TLI in a few months, in any event.  I
|heard he cut prices on his dictionary, but he's getting as bad on Lognet
|as we have been on our journal, so I haven't seen much of anything
|'official'.
|
|It occurred to me after I sent my message off to you that you might be
|interested in our draft proposal to DARPA of a few years back for Lojban
|research into NLP.  I'm not sure what our release policy is or should be
|on this document, but it shows where our thinking was a few years ago,
|in any event.  (We didn;t get the contract, needless to say.)
|
|There also has been some work, which might be up on the ftp server, on
|converting Lojban to PROLOG, since there is a very close mapping between
|the two languages.  The "nsn" address I ghave been 'ccing to is the guy
|who did this work.
|
|lojbab
|Cc: lojbab nick
|
|
|Message 21:
|Date: Mon, 20 Jun 94 11:35:46 -0600
|From: Randall Holmes <holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu>
|To: holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu, lojbab@access.digex.net
|Subject: Re:  Lojban
|Cc: nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au
|
|I would be very interested in the documents you describe.  You should be
|aware that I am an officer of TLI (consultant on logical issues and
|non-voting member of the Academy) if that has a bearing on your release
|policy.
|
|If you recall, I have contacted you before and you sent me your public
|material on grammar and phonology.  My conclusion was that Loglan and
|Lojban are essentially identical (mod technical details) and that it
|would be extremely hard to learn and use both languages because of the
|exact parallelism between their grammar and morphology!  I think that
|the combination of parallel structure and mutual unintelligibility makes
|a rapprochement between the two languages very difficult (it is not
|clear to me what a learner of either dialect has to gain by learning the
|other; the extra learning would all be in the predicate vocabulary area
|(most tedious and least interesting!); the one interesting project I
|could envisage would be the development of automatic translation between
|the two languages, which might be an interesting laboratory project.
|
|Re my claim that the languages are identical:  I DO recognize that
|Lojban has been making refinements; so has Loglan, actually.  Most of
|your changes I regard as improvements; some are in the process of being
|rediscovered and added to Loglan (I didn't initiate this process and the
|implementations in Loglan will probably be different).  But the
|fundamentals of the grammars are the same.  It is an extraordinary
|phenomenon to have languages so similar in this respect which are
|mutually unintelligible.
|
|I certainly do not think that either group has secrets of a linguistic
|character which are worth keeping from the other!  I could understand
|why you or we might want to keep secret an interesting line of research
|leading to possible applications in the real world, but I don't think
|that even there there is much to gain.
|
|You haven't heard from me further for three reasons:
|
|        i.  I decided that I couldn't learn both languages
|
|        ii.  I couldn't see any actual benefit from learning both
|                languages!
|
|        iii.  I became inactive even in Loglan.  (I DO think that JCB
|                owns or should own that name, by the way, morally if
|                not legally; acknowledging that we are "Loglan" and
|                you are a variant would probably have to be part of a
|                peace settlement; on the other hand, you should
|                certainly be able to say that you are an offshoot of
|                Loglan, since you are!).
|
|I am once again actively interested in Loglan; I am working
|professionally in the area of automatic theorem proving, and I am
|considering Loglan as a medium.  Actually, I would not be interested in
|writing specifically Loglan directed software; what I have considered is
|a variation on my prover system (which currently has a very simple input
|language) which would enable it to work with a large calss of
|YACC-parsable languages, probably including Loglan-Lojban.  If I do
|create such a beast, it would belong to me, not in any sense to TLI, and
|you could probably use it on the same terms as TLI.  This is not an
|imminent development.
|
|I have suggested to TLI, and reiterate the suggestion to you, that you
|ought to be mechanizing not only the grammar (via the parser) but also
|the allowed logical transformations of Lojban.  You will discover that
|this leads to interesting issues (when one term is substituted for
|another, additional disambiguation devices may need to be added, for
|instance).  Is Dr.  Parks-Clifford still actively involvoed with you,
|and, if so, is he interested in this kind of work?  I'm not proposing to
|do this for TLI myself, although if we undertake it I will probably
|offer advice.
|
|                                Sincerely,
|                                Randall Holmes
|                                holmes@math.idbsu.edu
|
|Mail>r
|To: holmes@diamond.idbsu.edu
|Subject: Re:  Lojban
|
|There probably isn't a lot of point arguing about the name 'Loglan'.
|Note that JCB himself does not claim that he owns the name, rather that
|TLI does.  His position was stronger legally but weaker morally, and was
|not good enough even then as a legal claim.
|
|I/we didn;t WANT to fight JCB, and there would still be one language if
|he hadn't made such grandiose claims about ownership, in order to ensure
|TLI's financial survival (which his claims wouldn't have accomplished in
|any case).
|
|I agree with you that rapprochement is unlikely, but I think it is
|mostly because JCB would not consider it.  He has no meaningful
|successor that can keep the project going, though, and when he at some
|time really retires or when he dies, TLI will probably die with him (or
|take a drastically different course under Jenny).  I am on resonable
|technical terms with RAM, and trying (obviously) with you, so tyechnical
|details of resolving differences could be worked out.
|
|Because so few people have really LEARNED TLI Loglan, I don't think that
|the mutually unintelligible vocabulary would be that much of a stopper
|if there was an attempt to remerge.  Relearning the prims is a pain,
|yes, but at least half a dozen people including my wife and I already
|did so AFTER mastering the old vocabulary.  LogFlash (our version of
|MacTeach) is VERY effective at this.  In the meantime, auto-translation
|will minimize difficulties.
|
|I'm not sure that there is any particular reason to keep the DARPA
|proposal secret, especially since we published it in one of our issues
|of Ju'i Lobypli.  There is still some paranoia here about TLI, and it
|wasn;t helped by Wesley Parsons' suggesting that TLI might find it
|legally offensive for us to publish a list of correspondences between
|TLI's prim list and ours.  He never came back to us with a clear answer,
|and we thus have had to take a view that he/JCB may be waiting for us to
|publish something just hoping that we will do something TLI can sue us
|for.  I've had enough to do with lawyers that I can;t trust TLI until
|that goal is explicitly disavowed, and we start talking again.
|
|It also isn;t clear that the DARPA proposal has all that much technical
|content - it was after all a pre-proposal, and wasn;t fully developed
|since we were under time and page count constraints.  We do intend to
|follow up on it at some point after we get books published.
|
|pc is still involved in the project (indeed he is VP of our org.) but
|his activity has been low since he is not on-line.  Or at least he
|wasn;t last I heard.  UMSL has been in the process of connecting to the
|net for 3 years now.  The whole campus is connmected, and he has had an
|email address for a year, but mail doesn;t get to him, nor has he ever
|managed to mail out to us.  When he does, I suspect that his involvement
|will become more significant.  We do consult with him by phone on issues
|related to logic and tense.
|
|I don't know if he is interested in the kind of thing you are talking
|about, but I can ask him, and perhaps he can communicate with you
|directly if he is interested.  Give me address/phone and I'll relay it
|to him.
|
|While I agree with you that there isn;t a lot of point in working with
|both versions of the language, I of course believe that you are missing
|out on some truly interesting technical developments (and we are missing
|out on your expertise).  I think that the nature of our work has led to
|us tackling a lot trickier logical issues than TLI has gotten to, and
|we've had to deal with them in some fairly sophisticated ways at times.
|(My favorite bugaboo is the English words "only" and "just" which don't
|go over into Lojban exceptionally well, because the English meanings
|turn out to often have multiple logical implications depending on the
|context.)
|
|But the level of our discussions is such that you might find it hard to
|follow the discussions without knowing more of our version of the
|language (not least because a couple of the people who get involved in
|the discussions try to write in-language, but in any case, much is made
|of particular examples andwe don;t so often rely on English translations
|of the Lojban to make clear what the examples mean.)
|
|The papers in John Cowan's reference grammar, on the ftp site in the
|"refgrammar" subdirectory will contain a lot of hints at our technical
|issues.  These are written about one step more deeeply in coverage of
|the langage than L1, which is as far as I know the deepest JCB has
|really tackled most issues of the language in print.
|
|Our major advantage is that our effort IS fully public.  You say that
|TLI has been making grammar refinements.  But, since the details never
|get published, these refinements are only hypothetical.  To the extent
|that anyone is actually trying to use TLI Loglan, only the inner circle
|that has access to the trade secret grammar and all its evolutionary
|changes have any idea what the language is supposed to be.  For the bulk
|of Loglanists, though, TLI Loglan is frozen at the level of L1, or at
|best, at L1+whatever issues of Lognet that they have (but Lognet is
|rarely conclusive in describing changes to the language).
|
|I or someone else will get back to you on the DARPA proposal and/or
|other aspects of the NLP thing, and I will talk to pc per your message.
|
|But by all means, let us keep talking.
|
|lojbab
|Cc: lojbab nick
|
|
|