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Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:07:05 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
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On 9/10/2014 9:16 AM, And Rosta wrote:
> Gleki Arxokuna, On 10/09/2014 06:51:
>> 2014-09-10 0:50 GMT+04:00 And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com
>> <mailto:and.rosta@gmail.com>>:
>>     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.
>> 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?
>>
>> The task is to adapt theory to facts, i.e. usage, not adapt reality
>> to facts provided this doesn't lead to syntactic ambiguity which is a
>> defining feature of lojban.
>
> There are three forces that potentially shape and define what is to be
> deemed correct:
>
> 1. usage
> 2. official codification
> 3. logic (mapping between phonological and logical forms), consistency,
> regularity, unambiguity, integrity
>
> & possibly a fourth:
>
> 4. unofficial consensus of opinion (or of influential opinion)
>
> (4) is important for English, maybe not for Lojban.
>
> All can conflict. Which trumps which? For me it's 3>2>1. For Bob I hope
> (because it's a position I can respect) it's 1>2>3. What do you think it
> is?

Actually, for me it is probably 2,4,1,3, mostly because we don't have 
any consistent standard for "usage" to say when it should trump either 
codification or consensus.  There is undoubtedly a lot of bad usage out 
there as well as good usage.

The voted-upon byfy output constitutes unofficial consensus of type (4) 
until such time as its output is incorporated in the new baseline (2).

> At the time I ceased active involvement with Lojban I had come to the
> view that that the community was wedded to 1>2>3 or 2>1>3 with immutable
> 2, but now I see that there are currents of opinion -- much stronger
> than ever in my time -- unwilling to accept either of those. Surely the
> only foreseeable outcomes are that the ultraconservative camp withers or
> that there is schism.

While I qualify as ultraconservative, you would be surprised by how much 
I will be willing to tolerate change approved by byfy consensus in a new 
baseline.  I stopped fighting xorlo as soon as the community felt it 
appropriate per the ZG, even if I have no clue how I should use it.

>>         More importantly, we have the history of dozens if not
>> hundreds of
>>         conlangs whose usage has not spread because people wouldn't stop
>>         fiddling with the language design.
>>
>>     I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify these dozens if not
>> hundreds of conlangs whose usage would have spread if people had
>> stopped fiddling with the language design.
>>
>> He won't. I can confirm his words. I've got a lot of people from
>> Russian group who immediately stopped learning Lojban when they
>> learnt that CLL was no longer valid.
>
> Bob was talking about conlangs not conlangers.

The conlangers changing the conlangs was what I was talking about.  It 
is arguable whether any given conlang failed for any particular reason, 
but everything I have read indicates that people move on either because 
a conlang had changed, or because they wanted it to change (and many 
conlangs (especially the Euroclones) that failed are little more than 
modifications to prior conlangs that never attracted more than a small 
fraction of the predecessor.

> I suppose your Russian drop-outs must have been fervent devotees of
> {1|immutable2} > 3. What was it attracted them to Lojban in the first
> place, such deviation from that ranking quenched their interest?

The "deviation" is clearly the lack of a trustworthy standard that they 
can learn from.

> You seem to have a strange notion of what language destruction is. You
> seem to think that a language exists if and only if it has speakers in
> our world.

That is certainly a requirement according to linguists.  Indeed native 
speakers is a commonly understood requirement.

> I accept that that's not a nonsensical view, tho I do think it's utterly wrong,

When you convince the academic linguistics community, let me know.  I 
fought that battle back before 1992 (and we were getting there very 
slowly by having some academic linguists, including Nick Nicholas, get 
papers about Lojban published.)

> There is a Google Play app maker called Vorgoron who made the app and
> gave it a description that says "Author - Gleki Arxokuna", which had
> misled me into thinking you were Vorgoron. Looking at Vorgoron's other
> apps, it seems likely that Vorgoron is Russian, so likely somebody you
> know.

I won't pretend to know how you can find an app for Lojban that isn't on 
the Lojban web site.  But that is my own ill knowledge.

lojbab

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