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Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 16:13:48 -0400
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
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On 9/9/2014 4:50 PM, And Rosta wrote:
> Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG, On 09/09/2014 18:30:
>> The other problem is that the "development" is supposed to already be
>> done. Long done. And for a lot of people, the idea that they might
>> have to go to Microsoft Lojban 8.0 from 7.0 is enough to make them
>> throw up their hands in disgust and turn away from the language. They
>> might accept small tweaks to fix bugs in "Lojban XP", but they don't
>> want to relearn anything.
>
> It seems to me you're setting up a largely false dichotomy. Most of what
> remains to be done is to complete the design where it is incomplete.

If incompleteness is what it is, then I can likely be convinced.  But I 
believe that the discussion was about change/evolution.

>> People might have tolerated running across some new word on an IRC
>> channel and looking it up; we deal with learning new vocabulary all
>> the time in natural language. But they don't like someone telling
>> them that the old way to do something is wrong, and there is a new
>> and better way.
>
> Are there still many that feel thus? I wonder if it's a myth that gets
> perpetuated because you propagate it so insistently.

It has been the bugaboo of pretty near every conlang project in history 
- the inability of the developers to stop tweaking it just a little 
more.  Thus it is not a matter of "still that many".  I'd have to be 
convinced that there is something distinctive about Lojban as to exclude 
it from the norm for conlangs in history.

> In old usage, "le" was standardly not used in a baseline-compliant way;
> cf how "le nu", "le ka", "le du'u" used to be default in usage.

That is still my default.  I don't know why it is not baseline-compliant 
(indeed, Xorxes has told me that the old usage is not incorrect under 
xorlo)

> In old
> and new usage (for new usage, I'm relying on Selpa'i's observation),
> logical scope of syntactic clausemates is generally ambiguous. How many
> people are going to want to preserve old ways that aren't
> baseline-compliant or are rampantly logically ambiguous?

Maybe a lot of people aren't too worried about being "logically 
ambiguous" as you call it.

>> This project is some 60 years old and we have a lot of history of
>> people explicitly leaving because of changes imposed from on-high.
>
> Not in the history of Lojban proper,

Most certainly yes.

> of course, because changes haven't been imposed from on-high.

Not since 1997 (except for xorlo).

>So all the folk leaving for the last 27 years
> have been leaving for other reasons; disgruntlement at the unfinished
> design

Unfinished documentation is the larger criticism.  We still need a real 
dictionary.  And probably several published books in-language, to show 
that people have invested the time in the language to produce such books 
knowing that they won't be obsolete with the next ad-hoc change proposal.

> and the political sclerosis that prevents its completion must be
> the major reason why people leave Lojban, out of all reasons that have
> to do with some sort of disaffection with Lojban.

I haven't seen evidence of politics being a significant factor.  Most 
people are undoubtedly oblivious to the politics.

The largest reason is still lack of time, coupled with a sense from 
discussion and product that we are done fiddling.

>>> in my mind, there is no way Lojban can be "considered DONE as an
>>> engineering effort".
>>
>> Then we are fundamentally at odds. It MUST be "done" at some point.
>> Engineering must stop, and we move to usage.
>
> Especially in the case of a language like Lojban, one expects that there
> will always be a strong strand of prescriptivism, in areas where usage
> deviates from the official design or from logic. Prescriptivism is a
> form of engineering.

Maybe, in a sense.  But I doubt that it will seem that way so long as 
the prescription doesn't change.

>> I have no idea what di'ai is. That is the problem with
>> experimental usages. They aren't documented, and people like me would
>> have no idea what to do with the word if we run across it in text.
>
> I went to the humungous effort of looking kibro and di'ai up in
> jbovlaste. To find jbovlaste, one googles "jbovlaste". Or, even quicker,
> google "jbovlaste kibro" and you get the answer in one step. For users
> of handheld devices, Gleki has made an android jbovlaste app -- it's
> excellent! And it's dead easy to use even for those of us who are weary
> at having to learn new technology.

I am before weary. %^) I don't even own a cell phone, much less 
something with a data plan (for one thing I have trouble reading the 
tiny buttons and screens, and would need a stylus because my fingers are 
too large for the keys - dialing a simple telephone number is a 
challenge for me).  "apps" are alien to me.  And I hate web-based 
software in general.  I avoid downloading software on my pc for fear of 
malware.  So learning new technology is something I rarely deal with.

lojbab

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