Re: [lojban] Re: CLL and modern Lojban

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

The main problem with coming to a democratic agreement about Lojban is, who should participate in that democracy? Lojban has a tiny number of fluent speakers, overwhelmed by a much larger community of non-speakers. Any sort of process whose participants were the community broadly would probably be inclined to reach decisions like, "We think it would be a good idea to just speak the way it says in the book and not change anything!" But from the perspective of people who actually speak Lojban, the book was just a theoretical proposal and there's practical reasons why it can't all be implemented exactly as written. 

It's not actually a large enough community to form "dialects" in the ordinary sense. All of the fluent speakers understand one another. But because Lojban is more precisely defined than most languages, we can make formal distinctions between ways of speaking that in another language community would just be ignored as the incomprehensible complexities of language. If you make a change to English grammar, nobody necessarily even exactly understands how the change works, because no one understands how English works, because language. If you make a change to Lojban you can precisely document it and then you can have a special parser that understands that amended grammar. In other words being able to formalize the grammar makes changes more evident by making it easy to document them. The semantics of the base words has also been changing over the years, but because there's no formalization of those meanings you can't so easily tell it's happening. 

On Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 3:04 PM, <sukender1@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow. This is even worse than I thought.

One great thing about Lojban is that it is supposed to be unique. What I read here is like if people said "Hey, I invented a Lojban-French", and "Me, a Lojban-Chinese", and "Lojban-English"... That sounds so stupid.

Let me be clear: I'm NOT judging anyone forking Lojban. Surely they had good reasons to do so. Actually nobody can pretend forseeing any case, and write an "immutable" language. So yes, it is obvious that the language evolves and will evolve, even an hypothetic "official an unique" Lojban.

What is unfortunate is that all forking work should be reintegrated in some way to the "trunk", or else we'll end up with many "Lojbans" wich will actually kill Lojban (whatever version).

I understand the lack of leadership, but it feels more like a lack of structures for democraty. It would be nice to have such structures, but unfortunately I don't know how this could be initiated. One idea would be to mimic software, a bit as OpenGL did, having the core, extensions, and proposals.

To be frank, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel bad because my hope was that Lojban was more that just an experiment. Someone, please, prove me it is...

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