Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.
I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.
So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance.
Sounds oxymoronic to me.
I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.
That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.
They will also be ready for the inevitable, which is that there are commonly used grammatical structures which the CLL wilfully omits.
Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.
*Your* community.
And it's time I made a small correction. It's been a great mistake to call you a community. Communities stick together, but this make-pretend community is entrenched in disputes. The departure of a great member of a community typically comes off as worthy of grievance, but this community has seen giants go. Communities aren't the sort of places that come and go; you come and stay. Communities are something people contribute to through willpower and effort and their precious man-hours (and woman-hours too), but the only experience I've seen radiate from those who've tried and failed to incorporate themselves in the Lojbanic 'community' is one that's based on full-on unreciprocation. In a well-functioning community, people leave when they think they've done their dues; in a pathological community like this one, people leave because there's so much work to do that they're barred from doing.
I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.
Sure, spend effort on what matters least. Just to keep the *air* of business.
As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.
So you've jumped on the programming language train… oh boy do I have a lot to say in this matter.
Programming languages do improve. Java — a language that's close to relic status — has recently seen additions like lambdas, closures, anonymous classes… Every programming language which does not wish to be yanked off the mainstream train of thought tries its best to include the essential parts of what people want or need or can find in other places. We don't need to force people to use Functional Programming concepts, but we might as well leave those parts in so the ones who want it can have it and be happy.
Have you ever heard about Elm? It, too, is governed by a man who believes he can exercise absolute power. He, too, says things like ‘if you don't do X the Y way, then why are you using our product?’. All in the name of ‘being opinionated’. But we can be opinionated and permissive; we can foster diversity while maintaining a strong baseline; we can be descriptive without going all out. It can all be done, and the way strong Open Source projects are led can tell us a lot about what we're doing wrong. I predict that Elm is going to get forked away from very soon; Lojban, with its despotic attitude and little room for variation, is going to be moved away from. It's happening, and once it's reached full impetus, you won't be able to stop it.
However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.
What I think is of little importance too.
You say that, but you're very strong in asserting your opinions. If you think you should bow to the Founding Fathers of the language and to the demigods which preside in the committee (whatever its form of presentation is), then you're doing this in vain. Language is to free thought, not enslave it.
I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.
I don't have a problem with treating CLL Lojban as ‘baseline’ Lojban. In fact, I wrote a little essay on the matter around two years ago [1], and although it's hard for me to gauge the reactions, I can tell you that calling the ‘official dialect’ the ‘base(line) dialect’ doesn't do said dialect any harm — quite the opposite: it empowers people who want to experiment to experiment, and gives this base dialect an incentive to develop — slowly and rationally.
If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).
See above. And the ‘tinkerers’ (as you've taken to calling them) aren't at fault; you're just getting a taste of your own medicine.
Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?
That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.
You know what makes learning harder? Tons upon tons of cmavo which nobody really uses and which could be phrased in simpler terms. Irregularities in gismu frames. Many, many internal distinctions like PU vs. VI vs. ZI vs. ZEhA vs. FAhA vs. BAI. And if your point is that the CLL is a definitive source of knowledge about what Lojban 1.0 the forever version should look like, then what about xorlo? This starts to feel like I'm trying to persuade a biblical absolutism into rejecting the absoluteness of the Bible. And if that's the case, the best approach is to walk away and leave them be; many people have done that so far. It's a telling sign.
However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.
Python 3 was released in 2008, and the official deprecation date for Python 2 was announced to be 2020. Do you really think that 12 years isn't enough to hop over?
You're making a moot point: in Python 3, `print` is made into a regular function; previously, it was a keyword. This reduces complexity, which is good — it regularizes the treatment of `print` (what's so special about it? why can't my procedure be made into a keyword?). The Python community has encouraged switching over to v3 for a long time, yielding such tools as 2to3.
All this shows that change can be allowed, even if you prefer to keep it slow. Today's language leaders' standpoint is not to attempt any change, even as it wheezes past them.
Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.
English is not prescriptive.
Languages themselves can't be descriptive or prescriptive; people and organizations and dictionaries are. For example, Polish is overseen by the RJP (the Polish Language Council), Finnish — by KOTUS (Institute for the Languages of Finland), and so on. But they're not to serve themselves, but the people which actually use the languages. If a change becomes mainstream, the RJP will vote itself over to its side.
It's important to remember that institutions like the LLG are not allowed to patronize us or to tell us that ‘this is how we do things because it's how we do them’. It's the people who have the right to choose — many have chosen against the absolutist bullshit. And that's why your community shrinks day by day.
All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel.
That's fine. They can leave.
You don't have the right to control who's around. Definitely not if they're not misbehaving. So far, the reasons for leaving the Lojban community have been weariness and helplessness. And you can't expect to deserve to be treated with due respect if people are ostracized and stigmatized.
Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.
They don't need the bullcrap that surrounds both. That's what it is. Many such people make these decisions against what their hearts tell them, but sanity is more important than appeasement.
And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.
There is space; there's little incentive. The halls have been decked with spikes.
I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.
You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.
Dismissal is not the right path to take. As I said above, this *will* turn against you. The people united will never be defeated.
~ ~ ~
Perhaps it's time to do the right thing — fork. Somebody (maybe me myself, who knows) should do God's work and rethink the grammar, rethink the vocab, rethink the approach. Because if you stick to being stuck and you're stuck in being stuck, then the people watching who have enough integrity to step back and distance themselves a little so they're not dragged into the pit will leave you be. And that's what you want — to be left alone. But a committee doesn't exist with a community, and since the community has pretty much dispersed, the committee has failed to serve it.
I'm not going to drag this pointless rowing about for any longer; it's Easter and I'm supposed to rejoice with my family. All I can say is: if you are sure you know what you're doing and you're so adamant to keep at it, then power to you. However, it's you who'll face the consequences, and hurting others is one such consequence.
— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.