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Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 17:03:05 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Revitalizing LLG: Suggestions for the 2014 annual meeting
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On 8/19/2014 4:10 PM, TR NS wrote:
> What is BPFK?
>
> All this is a little hard to understand as someone new to the community.
> Also, seems like you guys have things ahh... well made things a little
> bit complicated ?

It is an acronym for the lojban phrase for 
language-plan-responsible-committee.  The chairman has the title "jatna" 
meaning "captain, leader, chief".

Things aren't that complicated, but are to some extent constrained by 
history, and an extensive knowledge of what hasn't worked so far 
(remembering that Loglan originally started almost 60 years ago, and its 
redesign Lojban almost 30 years ago).

Originally, I, as Founder of the project, pretty much made all decisions 
about the language design, advised by others who were participating at 
the moment.  By 1994, it had been clearly demonstrated that I no longer 
could aspire to do everything - I had too much on my plate as well as a 
couple of kids newly adopted from Russia.  Others informally took up 
various tasks, with John Cowan taking over as "chief grammarian" among 
other things.  He wrote a bunch of essays on language design and revised 
some that I had written (as well as one from Nick Nicolas and one from 
my wife Nora), and by 1997 assembled them into what is now the Lojban 
reference grammar _The Complete Lojban Language_ (CLL).

One of my remaining projects was to produce a Lojban dictionary based on 
the gismu, cmavo, and rafsi lists along with some number of well-defined 
lujvo.  I started to do so, but became severely hung up on how to 
produce dictionary quality definitions of the cmavo.  Partly this 
depended on the essays that Cowan was writing (a project that was 
originally called "the selma'o catalog").

The bottom line is that CLL got done, and we still had no dictionary. 
The members were tried of waiting for me, and the result was that we 
declared a baseline (stating that the language development was DONE and 
not going to change).  This was vital to many people because 
historically many had held back from learning Loglan/Lojban because it 
was perpetually changing - not naturally, but by decree.

So I agreed that I/we would no longer change anything in the language, 
and that we would finish the dictionary, which with CLL and the parser 
would constitute a formal set of documentation for the language.  The 
design was to freeze for a minimum of 5 years (hopefully longer).

But by 2002, after 5 years from the original baseline, we still had no 
dictionary definitions for the cmavo, and hence no complete 
documentation.  John Cowan and I were unable to keep up the time and 
energy needed to do it ourselves, so LLG as an organization delegated 
the job to the BPFK, with Nick Nicolas as jatna.

As the discussion of this thread has described, it is now 12 years later 
and we still have no cmavo dictionary.  One significant change from CLL 
(called "xorlo") has been widely accepted by language users, and other 
usages are deviating somewhat from the CLL description.  So there is 
much pressure to finally get something done, especially since we are 
about a year away from selling out of the original edition of CLL.

Meanwhile, the Internet has completely changed the way most people do 
this sort of activity, and the organization hasn't really kept up with 
the times (and I more than most, since I don't even use a cell phone, 
and only minimally use FB and no other social networking.)

The issue came up at least in part because I've had a series of serious 
health problems over the last year, and I have to consider the future of 
the organization when I no longer am able to participate even to the 
minimal extent that I have.  That affects primarily the organizational 
aspect of the Logical Language Group more than the language itself, 
though finally completing my promises of a couple decades ago is rather 
important to me.

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