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Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 17:46:16 -0400
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update
From: Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>
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On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 5:06 PM, Adam Lopresto <adamlopresto@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 3:54 PM, Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Question:
>>
>> Is it your intention to fork off of Lojban? If so, what do you believe
>> fracturing the speech community will accomplish? If not, why are you
>> making no apparent effort to make this any kind of official project?
>
>
> We tried that; you can read the thread linked above
> (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lojban/_juGorRhWtI) if you want the
> nitty gritty, but the short answer is that the LLG is committed to
> thoroughly documenting CLL-Lojban before any other work can be done. We feel
> that that that standard is out of date, and that effort toward perfecting it
> would be better spent advancing modern usage.

Do you believe reordering the places of a gismu into something that is
not consistent with current usage (but is an improvement, at least if
you do it well) will "more accurately reflect the current state of the
language" (Dustin's phrasing) than working to fully document the
language as it stands? I'm not aware of any gismu whose dominant usage
is entirely self-consistent but at odds with the standard you describe
as "out-of-date," but it's possible I'm wrong - I'm not nearly as
involved in the use of the language as I was a decade ago.

Also: let me point out that there has been at least one successful
occasion wherein an area of the language felt to be in need of serious
reform was approved by the LLG, *after* the foundation of the BPFK.
(In fact it's BPFK work that brought the proposal forth.) The process
created to make this possible explicitly references BPFK work, though,
and is intensely restrictive as a compromise with the hardliners who
comprise a large fraction of the current voting membership (yes,
that's the reason for the restrictions; I wrote the ZG policy, and I
did so in terms that basically go "seriously guys, support for this is
*so freaking overwhelming*, can we just let it in now?"), but there's
nothing set in stone about those restrictions being unable to be eased
the next time some proposal has such broad support from the community.
The fact that we did pass the ZG policy (even with the compromise of
it requiring unanimous buy-in from the ZG plus a members' vote to put
anything into the ZG) and then gave xorlo the LLG's official
imprimatur (which I think led directly to its being the standard way
the language is spoken and taught, as opposed to something almost
nobody ever actually used despite lots of us thinking it sounded like
a good idea) gives the lie to the notion that the LLG will never
approve anything not perfectly compliant with the CLL as written. In
fact, that's part of the point of having the BPFK at all - if we were
hamstrung by the idea that everything had to match 100% with the
badyxu'e, then we'd be promising never to fix any of the ways in which
that standard has been found buggy.

By leaving behind the current language documentation and refinement
process (and it very much is also about fixing the broken bits as we
find them, even if the process of documenting the brokenness and
putting forth ways to actually fix it is basically halted at the
moment), you're almost inevitably separating this effort from the
version of the language that will come out of the BPFK if its work
ever gets finished. (As somebody who stepped down from BPFK things for
many of the same reasons Lojbab identifies, my hat is off to anyone
who helps make that happen. I might step up to give it a go again in a
less intense fashion, though as I work in baseball I have minimal free
time for such things until the end of the summer.) If, however, a
"suggested gimste revisions" document were to be part of the BPFK's
output even before the rest of the work is done or even close, then it
would almost certainly be a part of the official standard at the time
that the official standard is completely defined.

Step one in how I'd want to see something like this done: participate
in LLG meetings. I know you're on the mailing list for them, but
AFAICT you're not currently a member, and I'm not aware of you or
Dustin having expressed any any interest in becoming one. The LLG is
not, in any way, committed to anything its members don't want it to
be, and most members are in favor of any and all active users of the
language who care about its future having a voice in directing that
future. It is beneficial to neither the LLG as an organization nor the
wider Lojban community for official status to be associated with
decisions made only by us curmudgeonly old-timers (and curmudgeonly
medium-timers, in my case) due to a lack of involvement by the people
who make up the bulk of the language's current user base!

 - mi'e .kreig.

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