C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Martial arts offer various colors of belts. The chess community uses a system for ranking players. After much discussion, Lojban the logical language now has an online translation game named jboselkei where Lojban-speakers can grade each other's translation attempts and track our overall scores. It will be a fun learning tool and will help to expand the corpus of usage examples. As the FAQ says: "jboselkei isn't primarily a rating system; it is a dynamic bilingual database of Lojban to which everyone can contribute."

Designing a meaningful system was a challenge in sociology, ethics, and valid testing. The end result is promising! By harnessing the wisdom of crowds, jboselkei could end up being the best thing to happen to Lojban ever.

Remember the scene from "Wayne's World The Movie" in which Wayne speaks only a word or two of Cantonese and the subtitle translates it as "The irony is, I feel partly responsible for her self-nullifying behaviour"? That text will be my next post to jboselkei.

camgusmis had some great thoughts on the xartum development messageboard.

It looks like spell casting would almost always involve the Perl programming language, whereas altering the world with Lojban is then the equivalent of prayer because it requires somebody to implement it in Perl ... or it's the equivalent of incanting familiars to do one's bidding, depending on how one feels about transcendent artificial intelligences who have breached a toposophic boundary.

It also makes me chuckle to imagine characters in the game entreating specific real-world Perl programmers by name in their prayers (or grimoires, if the Perl programmer is a BOFH). We can pretend that one of the transcended beings used to be Nat Torkington or somebody. But he is certainly no demonic familiar. He's more like a trickster god, I think.

One of the neatest things about xartum is that I might actually have a purpose toward which to put programming skills. We have the idea of creating a School For Magic located in xartum, in which those players who know Perl will teach rudimentary ways to interact with the game database to those of us who don't. Classes will be held in character, and almost entirely in Lojban.

I like the idea of game rules that are code. If someone finds a loophole, we should take a page from the story of "cheating Death" in "Lessons from Lucasfilm's Habitat" and not violate the world model. The gods should allow the mortal to keep whatever result he/she get from it, and then patch the code to prevent further exploit.

The niftiness of xartum is increasing by mathematical factors.

In a few days I will set down my goals for 2006. Last year at this time I blogged about my goals for 2005. It's now time to review.
( Read more... )

What do most people think of when they think of languages? Nations. Ordinarily, learning a second language is done to live, work, or vacation in another country. I proposed to the Logical Language Group that we officially sanction an online game to serve as an imaginary internet nation where Lojban is spoken. It appears at this point that it will take place in a text-based online game, which is in development now.( Read more... )

Ford had a good time with the gang at Tio's and fit right in. tlatoani had a great idea for me: a foundation to help kids from fundamentalist religious families go to accredited schools. Ford says if I start such a foundation, Universism can provide the corporate structure under the Universism charity. It seems like this is the week for meeting people who I've known for years only on the internet! In addition to Ford's visit, this weekend I'll meet Robin Lee Powell and several other speakers of Lojban at their intermittently-annual gathering. I call it "try-annual" because we try to have it annually. Tomorrow morning Bill and I leave for Pennsylvania to attend Philcon, which has set aside a room for Lojban. Bill won't attend Logfest, of course; but he needs a good science fiction convention where he doesn't have to worry about running it. I've made this 11-hour car drive twice all alone, and I'll be very glad to have another driver.

I've put up the second episode of jbocradi, my podcast which is mostly in English about Lojban, rather than all spoken in Lojban. I made a spiffy new webpage for it. Gotta show off my skillz in Cascading Style Sheets.

In this episode:
Pronouncing "o"
The Holoalphabetic Sentence
Phrasebook Part 2
Lojban As An International Auxiliary Language

The webpage looks the way it does in order to try to communicate through association. That's why, on every new journal entry, I put a Photoshopped image from various types of mechanical puzzles, and that's why I put that opinionated little editorial in the sidebar about incompatable file formats. I have to compensate heavily for the fact that the fastest way to get someone to run away and never come back is to speak something other than their native language. Tempting someone to try a new thing (assuming they are part of the target audience at all) requires quickly planting a seed in their imagination. It requires associating it with some activity, philosophy, or group, that they might already like. If they aren't in the target audience, at least this will make them friendly toward it.

In this LJ thread I recently had a debate over the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance. debeorn is of the view that it "simply acknowledges that the country is accountable to something more powerful then itself, even if that is the World Conciousness." I was of the view that although it's good for our nation to be accountable to its neighbors, world opinion and God are not interchangable terms.

The following may seem like a change of topic but in fact it's a serendipitous occurance. Yesterday I commented on the Lojban mailing list.

...in Lojban, either you leave gender unspecified, or you make an introductory remark about gender as in "I'm going to tell you a story about 'it,' and oh by the way 'it' was male" and the subject never comes up again without constant inconvenient awkardness. Instead of merely providing gender-neutral options so that we don't default to sexist usages, Lojban seems to make you work hard to provide the casual, ubiquitous gender awareness we are used to.

Today a member of the Lojban mailing list responded to demonstrate why this aspect of Lojban is a good thing.

Why should it be any more relevant, when discussing (say) a shopkeeper from whom I bought something today, that the shopkeeper is a man, but not that, say, the shopkeeper is Oriental, or short, or any of the equally obvious categories said shopkeeper might fit into? Yet English, like most natural languages, forces me to drag one of them in, willy-nilly, and makes me work to drag any of the others in. I much prefer the Lojban way, making you say what you mean, but not requiring you to say more than you mean - and not making it trivial to say "the person I was speaking of (who happens to be a man)" and clumsy to say "the person I was speaking of (who happens to be short)".

She attached a link to an article in which Douglas Hofstadter writes as a racist fictional character "William Satire". See especially the explanatory postscript by Hofstadter. "Satire" inhabits a fictional universe in which perfect sexual equality has been attained, even in our pronouns, but all usages of the word "man" such as "mailman," "chairman," and "mankind" have been always been "mailwhite," "chairwhite" and "whitekind." He does not see this as racist, and supports that assertion with arguments similar in nature to that of debeorn. lorrraine is especially going to get a kick out of this.

Today I began a monthly or bi-monthly Lojban podcast. You can subscribe by pointing a feed aggregator here. The direct download of the mp3 is here. A big "thank you" goes out to the Precursor project for granting permission to include their beautiful free music which you can download in its entirety on their site.

Over the weekend, that one guy from the west coast who hates Unix and open source software was flaming the Lojban mailing list about the Lojban flag, which is a cartesian coordinate system superimposed on a Venn diagram. (The reason we need a flag is for graphic language-selection menus.) He thinks it makes our language look like it's associated with open source software and science fiction. Um, it's probably not a coincidence that most jbopre are involved in one or more of them. I happen to like the logo, but he got me thinking what I would have submitted in the design contest if I had been involved at the time. I invented an alternative logo and flag for Lojban. Is it not nifty?



So far feedback from Lojban speakers has been encouraging. But it's more than just attractive, it's symbolic. Colors are the purplish-blue and burgundy-magenta used in the earliest years of Epcot Center's Future World. The art repeatedly uses the Fibonacci ratio or "golden" ratio, phi, symbolizing consistency in rules, and modular expansion. It's asymmetrical in every direction, symbolizing unique decomposition and parsing. The dots symbolize the five default fill-in-the-blanks in a simple Lojban sentence. The person's arms embrace them into a relationship. Inside the mind is the thought of that relationship, so the head is between the first and second blanks, just like the relationship word or phrase in a Lojban sentence. This represents Lojban's precise syntax.
Only after the top was done did I realize it could be extended downward to become a human form. This anthropomorphic figure personalizes the ideogram and symbolizes:
Cultural neutrality algorithmically derived from the five largest language groups of our species.
Root word concept choices derived from anthropomorphic concerns.
Attitudinals, which can be combined modularly into one of the most thorough catalogs of the human heart offered by any language.

The Lojban mailing list directed me to a fascinating article about new linguistics research:
"New research by Dan Everett (University of Manchester) into the language of the Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil disputes two prominent linguistic ideas regarding grammar and translation. The Pirahã are intelligent, highly skilled hunters and fishers who speak a language remarkable for the complexity of its verb and sound systems. Yet, the Pirahã language and culture has several features that not known to exist in any other in the world and lacks features that have been assumed to be found in all human groups. The language does not have color words or grammatical devices for putting phrases inside other phrases. They do not have fiction or creation myths, and they have a lack of numbers and counting. Despite 200 years of contact, they have steadfastly refused to learn Portuguese or any other outside language. The unifying feature behind all of these characteristics is a cultural restriction against talking about things that extend beyond personal experience. This restriction counters claims of linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, that grammar is genetically driven system with universal features. Despite the absence of these allegedly universal features, the Pirahã communicate effectively with one another and coordinate simple tasks. Moreover, Pirahã suggests that it is not always possible to translate from one language to another."
Emphasis mine. I wonder if the Pirahã are indiginous Universists!