From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Oct 16 16:16:46 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:16:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IhveX-0003To-Ro for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:16:46 -0700 Received: from eastrmmtao104.cox.net ([68.230.240.46]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IhveU-0003Td-To for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 16:16:45 -0700 Received: from eastrmimpo02.cox.net ([68.1.16.120]) by eastrmmtao104.cox.net (InterMail vM.7.08.02.01 201-2186-121-102-20070209) with ESMTP id <20071016231637.GNXS28183.eastrmmtao104.cox.net@eastrmimpo02.cox.net> for ; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:16:37 -0400 Received: from [127.0.0.1] ([72.192.234.183]) by eastrmimpo02.cox.net with bizsmtp id 1BGY1Y01S3y5FKc0000000; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:16:35 -0400 Message-ID: <471546B5.7090304@lojban.org> Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:18:13 -0400 From: Robert LeChevalier User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 (Windows/20050923) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Why not a new LfB text? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 5483 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lojbab@lojban.org Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners Danny wrote: > I've been trying to learn Lojban off and on for several years. I > recently subscribed to this mailing list in an attempt to keep myself > interested in the language. > > There was a discussion about a week ago about how Lojban has changed > since Lojban for Beginners was written and I am curious as to why > nobody has bothered to updated the material. Lojban has not changed since LfB was written. There are two things going on. 1. While the language was baselined several years ago, we never managed to come up with dictionary-quality definitions for the cmavo. A committee called byfy was charged with this task, and has been bogged down because it is difficult and somewhat boring. Furthermore, the effort has identified parts of CLL and LfB that are vague and/or confusing (and sometimes even contradictory), and the byfy task has expanded to include making the necessary clarifications. 2. At the same time, there are a couple of areas of the language that some people have problems with. These problems are difficult to explain to beginners, and most of the time don't cause any real problem with communication. The byfy has considered solutions, but nothing is final yet. Two particularly popular proposals, known colloquially as "xorlo" and "the dot side" generated the most debate. The xorlo proposal has drawn little opposition (until this week) and has apparently been informally adopted by most people on IRC, but it isn't official; there are proposals to make it official right away without waiting for the rest of the byfy work to be completed, and then the statement would be correct that "Lojban has changed". The problem is that when people are confused over something in the two books, a xorlo supporter will explain things differently from a user who uses the baseline language. To them, the language has changed. >After all, Lojban for > Beginners is licensed under a Creative Commons license so anyone could > fork it. Also, there is a Wikibook that badly needs attention at > http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban and anyone who has a good > understanding could contribute. There are many more tasks needing to be done, than there are people with time to do them. Most of the people competent to write a Lojban textbook would prefer to either use the language, or to try to get the byfy work done. Given that there remains disagreement as to what the language "should be", people have decided that modifying the books would be a premature effort. lojbab