gistfile1.txt

What are the official goals of lojban?


It is important to have an understanding of the goals for ongoing work (finishing BPFK sections, etc.),
otherwise we will end up with stuff that is inconsistent.
I think in the past people involved have an implicit understanding of the goals, due to having been around much longer, and/or closely involved in BPFK.

I am after an official clear statement of goals for lojban (or reference to one), for the benefit of those of us who have not been around for so long.



The best source I can find is the CLL:
https://dag.github.io/cll/1/1/

> The goals for the language were first described in the open literature in the article “Loglan”, published in Scientific American, June, 1960.

> The following are the main features of Lojban:
> Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
> Lojban is designed to be neutral between cultures.
> Lojban grammar is based on the principles of predicate logic.
> Lojban has an unambiguous yet flexible grammar.
> Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguously resolves its sounds into words.
> Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.
> Lojban’s 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.
> Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exceptions.
> Lojban attempts to remove restrictions on creative and clear thought and communication.
> Lojban has a variety of uses, ranging from the creative to the scientific, from the theoretical to the practical.
> Lojban has been demonstrated in translation and in original works of prose and poetry.



I also found some other materials with similar lists of features, and a similar reference to the goals of TLI Loglan:
http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban_Introductory_Brochure
http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=ralju_papri
http://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=From_Wikibooks:_Lojban/Introduction_to_Lojban#Lojban


There has also been some discussion of goals on this list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/lojban/goals/lojban/jDRfYun5Rs4/o8LqJicWwyUJ






Several of these sources have referenced the goals of TLI Loglan.
So what are the goals of TLI Loglan?

Note; I'm quoting the bits I think are possibly relevant to my question of goals, trying to provide a helpful summary.
Please read more of these documents to get more context or to add anything else I missed.


First, lets look in the 1960 Scientific American Article:
http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Scientific+American+article
http://members.home.nl/w.dijkhuis/loglan_jcb/Brown_JC_loglan.html
http://www.dersaidin.net/lojban/reference/LoglanScientificAmerican1960/  (mirror)

> It was to supply an instrument for experimental investigation of the Leibniz-Whorf hypothesis that we undertook our work on Loglan in 1955.
> Loglan was to be an artificial language, but one especially designed to test the thesis that the structure of language determines the forms of thought.
> It was to have a small, easily learned vocabulary derived from the word stock of as many of the major natural languages as proved feasible (though it was not intended to be an auxiliary international language).
> Its rules of grammar and syntax were to be as few and regular as possible.
> It was to utilize a short list of speech sounds (phonemes) common to the natural languages [see table on opposite page], and it was to be phonetically spelled.

> But most important, Loglan was to incorporate as many of the notational devices of modern logic and mathematics as could be adapted to its use. 




The other good source I found on TLI Loglan is this book, Loglan1, which appears to be the TLI Loglan equivilent of CLL:
https://ia700400.us.archive.org/11/items/Loglan1/Loglan1.pdf
http://www.dersaidin.net/lojban/reference/Loglan1.pdf    (mirror)

In chapter 1, there are sections 1 through 9 that cover a different goal (or maybe feature/viewpoint).

== 1.1 The Scientific Strategy ==
> Loglan is a language which was originally devised to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
> that the structure of language determines the boundaries of human thought.

> The most promising way to create such a difference, it seemed to me, was to exaggerate some 
> natural function of human language, that is, to increase the functional adequacy of some complex 
> of linguistic structures in a way that would have a strong independent likelihood of enhancing 
> the measurable performance of its learners on some specified set of tasks. Besides, in its original 
> formulation the Whorf hypothesis is a negative one: language limits thought. One way of 
> disclosing such phenomena is to take the suspected limits off, more precisely, to push them 
> outward in some direction in which removing limits would have predictable effects. So it was 
> settled. The diminutive language should also be a functionally extreme one in some known or 
> presumable way: an extremely poetic one, say, or an extremely efficient one, or extremely 
> logical.

== 1.2 Loglan as a Logical Language ==
> But the claim invested in this metaphor is in fact narrower than the wide 
> word 'logical' suggests. Loglan is logical only in the sense of purporting to facilitate certain 
> limited kinds of thought: namely those kinds which proceed by the transformation of sentences 
> into other sentences in such a way that if the first are true so also are the second. We might
> also expect it to minimize, or help prevent, the errors that are usually made in performing such 
> deductive operations. But these are fairly modest senses of the word 'logical'. We might have 
> meant to convey by it the much stronger claim that Loglan is a deductive system, in the sense 
> that geometry and formal logic are. To support such a claim we would have had to show that 
> Loglan had a set of elementary notions and elementary operations from which all its complex 
> notions and complex operations had been rigorously derived. But we do not make this claim.

== 1.3 Loglan as a Laboratory Instrument ==
> Apart from the thought-facilitating functions of Loglan, the language is also meant to be a 
> manageable laboratory instrument: teachable, measurable, controllable; its structure transparently 
> observable both at the moment of introduction into any experiment and in continuous change

> But Loglan does seem to be easily learned,11 and on every formal parameter it is agreeably small.
> The number of its grammar rules is an order of magnitude less than has come to be expected of natural grammars from recent work.

> While the size of a language is not the only factor that determines the speed with which it is learned, it is 
> undoubtedly an important one; and all my early teaching trials have suggested that Loglan is indeed very rapidly learned.

> Another feature of the language that reflects its intended use as a laboratory instrument is its cultural neutrality.

== 1.4 Loglan in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory  ==
> Loglan grammar is not only known but already written in a machine-parsable code. So it is itself the beginning of an AI program.

> Besides, if the partial grammars now in hand are any indication, 
> when a complete grammar of a natural human language is finally written, it will be far too large 
> for programmatic manipulation in the AI lab. Natural languages are very large affairs.

> Thus, more than anything else it is the small size, formal completeness and machine parsability 
> of Loglan grammar that seem to suit it for manipulation in the artificial intelligence laboratory. 

== 1.5 Loglan at the Machine-Man interface ==
> ...to make the machine-man interface truly comfortable for humans and yet continue to be instructive
> for machines, we need a language in which the requirements of both humans and machines are met.

> Loglan may be such a language. We have seen that it is utterly unequivocal grammatically. One 
> consequence is that we humans become aware of what we are actually saying when we talk 
> Loglan. So a Loglan-speaking human is much less likely to say one thing while meaning another, 
> thus misinforming his or her machine. Also, as we shall see in the next chapter, Loglan words 
> resolve uniquely from the speech-stream; no 'I scream'/'Ice cream' phenomena exist in it. So even 
> spoken instructions are unequivocal in Loglan. This is true of no other language. Being able to 
> speak freely composed instructions spontaneously would add immeasurably to the speed and 
> comfort of the interaction for humans, and yet, because it's Loglan, its being spoken would not 
> diminish its precision for machines. 

> What do we human partners in this high-powered interaction require? That we be permitted to 
> express our thoughts fully, freely and spontaneously without the risk of seriously misinforming 
> our machines. That we be able to understand most of the machine's word-choices and all its 
> utterance-forms immediately, and be able to clarify by interrogation whatever part of the 
> computer's responses to us we do not immediately understand.

== 1.6 Loglan as a Translation Medium ==
> Consider the problem. An original document, say a French article on galactic evolution, is to be 
> translated into a dozen other languages, from Chinese to Swahili. As this project would be 
> implemented now, it would turn into a dozen separate translation tasks, each performed by its 
> own bilingual expert, or team of experts, if as many as a dozen could be found. But with Loglan 
> as the translation medium, the project would be transformed into essentially one task: translation 
> of the French document into Loglan. Admittedly this would require human effort aided by 
> whatever computer algorithms the agency had developed for this purpose. But the resulting 
> Loglan document could then be more or less instantly retranslated into almost any number of 
> other natural tongues, and this second step could in principle be performed, and so eventually in 
> practice, by machines. 

== 1.7 Loglan in Information Storage and Retrieval ==
> Another not quite so incidental by-product of using Loglan as a translation medium would be 
> that the Loglan texts so created would be well-adapted for the machine storage and retrieval of 
> the information they contained. For one of the same reasons that Loglan Is suitable at the 
> interface, namely that knowledge stored in the predicate notation is apparently usable by both 
> machines and humans, texts translated into Loglan and stored on some electronic medium could 
> later be searched and even studied by machines. The studying Machines would be computers 
> "trained", i.e., programmed in the AI style, in the human art of scholarly reading. Although key 
> words and Phrases can be searched for now, and in texts written in any language, natural 
> language texts cannot yet be understood by computers in this way. 
> Once again Loglan yields a special benefit because its grammar is transparent and its meanings 
> clear.

== 1.8 Loglan as a Planetary Second Language ==
> Although Loglan was not designed for this bright future, it may nevertheless have attributes that fit it for the job.

== 1.9 Loglan as a Linguistic Toy ==
> This is the perspective from which Loglan is seen by many individuals, not as a 
> research tool, not as contribution to the machine-man interface, not as a candidate for the 
> international auxiliary, but as a delightful and very human toy.


So out of all this, what are officially the goals of lojban?

Thanks