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From: marob!think.com!gls (Guy Steele)
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To: marob.masa.com!cowan
Cc: snark.thyrsus.com!lojban-list
In-Reply-To: John Cowan's message of Wed, 28 Nov 90 14:13:47 EST <m0ieXE4-0000aPC@marob.masa.com>
Subject: Lojban Stability
Status: RO


   From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
   Date: Wed, 28 Nov 90 14:13:47 EST

   There is fear abroad in Lojbanistan, it seems.  People are afraid to write
   things in the language, to use the language, because what they write or
   say may become "obsolete":  it may change meaning, be judged ungrammatical
   by a new revision of the machine grammar, or may be plain wrong.  This
   fear inhibits the genuine development of the language, which consists not
   in TINKERING with vocabulary lists or YACC descriptions, but in speaking,
   reading, writing, and understanding generally....  [emphasis added]

 ".. late in the nineteenth century ... more drastic and visionary projects
were propounded: one or another artificial language, designed from scratch
for simplicity of grammar and ease of acquisition.

 "There had been two prophetic efforts in that direction already in the
seventeenth century ... These efforts were prompted rather by utopian visions
of rational semantics and syntax than by any current crisis in international
communication, for Latin still lingered ...

 "[In 1880, German priest J. M. Schleyer] launched his international
auxiliary language, Volapu"k ... In nine years Volapu"k spanned the civilized
world, spawning 285 Volapu"k societies and boasting a million initiates.
Then it began to splinter into rival dialects fashioned by devotees who
had ideas or creative urges of their own.

 "People who rise with enthusiasm to language reform are apt to be just the
ones with a taste for tinkering and innovating; and thus, ironically, an
artificial international language approaches its intended universality only
to crumble into a new Babel of its own."

		     ---W. V. Quine
			"Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary"
			(entry "Artificial Languages", page 9)
			The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
			Cambridge, Massachusetts (1987).

--Guy Steele