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dead links and any other problems.Last modified by B. R. Gilson (brg1942@gmail.com) June 20, 2009.
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This functions both as the apparent final progress report on the Voksigid
project to the conlang group and the apparent final communication to the
Voksigid development group, a. k. a. the newlang group. If anyone, either
by sending to the Voksigid group as a whole at newlang@buphy.bu.edu, or by
emailing to me at brgilson@highlite.gotham.com, evinces an interest in
reviving the Voksigid project, the possibility of continuing the effort
still exists, but I am pessimistic about the chances.
My observations are that the demise of the effort was not due to any
impracticality of implementing the concept that Voksigid represented. I still
feel that we might have, if a few non-linguistic happenings had been different,
come out with something better than Lojban at the things Lojban is best at,
while being easier to learn.
Voksigid went through three phases:
1. In a preliminary organization phase, we eliminated two people whose ideas
were so far removed from what the rest oif us had in mind that compromise was
clearly impossible. One of them, I feel, could well have contributed a lot of
useful ideas, but was so firmly wedded to an a priori vocabulary that we could
not hold him. His loss was unfortunate because I think he knew a lot about some
aspects of grammar that most of us did not know. The second of those would at
least have given us some input from a person whose native language was not
English, but it was very clear from early on that there was no compromise that
could embrace both him and myself; on one occasion I went so far toward his
proposal that it was making me ill to conceive of what was being done, and yet
he was accusing me of being unwilling to compromise. With the departure of those
two from the group, we were able to come up with some documents to define the
language, and at that point it looked as if we were making progress.
2. At that point, we began filling in the details. We developed a vocabulary,
fleshed out a few grammatical details, and I thought we'd soon have a language
created. Then disaster struck. One of us, who had been the most prolific source
of ideas in the first phase (and who, more than I, was the person whose
structure as first proposed turned out to be the one that the final Voksigid
resembled most closely) had to leave to devote full time to his dissertation.
Another changed schools. I myself, for a while, was incommunicado because I
lost the ability to receive e-mail at my work computer and needed to establish
a new location. That led to phase 3:
3. We got to a point where a proposal would be made, and nobody would respond.
It was clear that nothing more was going to happen. This is where we are now.
I think we have to give Voksigid a decent burial. The defining documents are
still, I assume, to remain on the PLS, and if someone sends a copy of Dave
West's final version of the lexicon to the PLS archives, they will have a
basis on which to proceed if anyone wants to take the role that Ashby and Clark
took to Hogben's Interglossa.
Observations:
Apparently, for an experimental language, the only organization scheme that
works is something like what happened in Lojban. One person (in that case, JCB)
developed a language, and a group was set up only much later, but the group
was much larger than we had, so that dropping out by 1 or 2 or 3 did not leave
them so shorthanded that paralysis started whenever two people disagreed. The
voting mechanisms I devised worked when we had 5 or 6 people; when we got down
to 3 we were lost. They would have worked better if we had the 9 or 10 I'd
originally envisioned. Lojban had one unfortunate experience, the split between
JCB and lojbab that required them to construct a totally new vocabulary from
scratch -- they'd be a year or two further along, I think, if that hadn't happened.
But (even though I can't read the language well enough to follow everything that goes
on) I think the group works well. I'd hoped that we could do that kind of thing
eventually. The only problem is getting to that point. A committee such as we had
doesn't seem to work. I'm sorry it doesn't. John Ross and Jim Carter, at least, had
useful ideas without which the language, if it had depended on me alone, would never
have been as good as the one we were on the threshold of developing. Jim, in
particular, even though he has his own creation (guaspi) and is also an active
participant in the Lojban group as well, was able to grasp the spirit of Voksigid
well enough that his suggestions were frequently right to the point, even though they
had to be different from the way guaspi or Lojban would handle the same problem. I
wish we had been able to get the same from the one person I mentioned earlier who
was the first to get off the boat.
Bruce
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