You're absolutely right about saying that's an issue finding a "democratic" way or such. I guess applying a "standard" democraty here isn't a good idea of course ; it must be adapted to the situation.
My (rough) idea is that people making decisions about Lojban must, at least, have significant knowledge of what they're talking about (This is clearly not my case, as I'm not fluent!). But this group ("committee"?) should accept the fact that language will evolve, whether they like it or not. I guess this idea is already spread and accepted, but I'm not 100% sure.
My (strictly personal) point of view is the same as yours : there are practical reasons that make evolution unavoidable. Other people (ie. "non-committee") should then be able to make proposals, run debates, and so on.
So, paraphrasing, here are some rules suggestions (to be debated!):
- What is "core" language has to be determined and be clearly stated.
- Reintegration of proposals to the "core" should be reviewed, fixed, and adapted by a "core committee" (Which size? ~10 to 50 people?).
- Being a member of such organization should be restricted to "meritant" people. Of course, "merit" needs to be defined (knowledge? previous work? fluency? all three?).
- Voting may also be slightly weighted with "merit".
- Proposals may be done by anyone. They may be "supported" by anyone (kind of "+1" vote), in order to put presure on the committee.
Is it even possible to get to that? It requires both willings and structures...
As for the first point (define what is "core"), I must say I personally was completely lost when I started studying. It is only because of answers in this thread that I discovered why.
It felt like anything was a bit fuzzy... except for the (outdated?) CLL. So I (naively) started with the CLL, which looked like "the" official reference.
@gejyspa: Thanks for clarification. I'm sorry for you.
la .sukender.
Le dimanche 5 novembre 2017 22:04:27 UTC+1, la stela selckiku a écrit :
Le dimanche 5 novembre 2017 22:04:27 UTC+1, la stela selckiku a écrit :
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, <suke...@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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