Message-Id: <199512181148.NAA09513@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Mon, 18 Dec 1995 06:46:13 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: TECH: PROPOSED GRAMMAR CHANGE X6: Simplification of compound
              tenses
To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 2682
Lines: 53

>>>> We can imagine the impression
>>>> this gives outsiders, when all we can tyalk about is what changes we are
>>>> thinking about.
>>>
>
>At this point, who cares? Lets get some of these things worked out before
>we have several thousand speakers. In my opinion, lojban is *not* just a
>toy. I believe it is very important; I do not waste my time on trivia, and
>I am spending considerable time learning & arguing about lojban. I believe
>that lojban offers much that esperanto does not, and that it will
>eventually be widely used. The decisions made now are likely to affect many
>people. lojbab is the de facto leader of the lojban endeavor and he needs
>to carefully consider how he will use his authority to guide the birth and
>development of the language.

At this point, those who care are the ones who have been nursi
ng this language
along for 3 decades under JCB and 8 years now with me.

Your implicit argument (not having yet read the rest of your post) in the
above paragraph is that if the language is not yet rready in the eyes of
some people who care deeply about the language, that I/we should think twice
before terminating the language engineering phase.

The problem is that as the Lojban community grows and att5racts new people
there is a never ending new succession of people who make exactly that
argument, and thus we continue to put off writing books and moving into a
phase when even Lojbab can spend dome time readinga nd writing Lojban, and
large numbers of people drift off into other more fertile endeavors that
offer a more reasonable chance of being rewarding during their lifetime.

Because as long as we are in development phase, a high percentage of those who w

will bother to learn the language will inmdeed only be those who think of the
language as a toy.  To attract serious users - people who can sustain Goran
and Jorge at their level of usage, we need to have an active community that
is MUCH larger than the 100- that has sustained Lojban List for several years
with 10% turnover every month.

The best we can say thus far is that I have done a good enough job to keep
the community from collapsing in our never-ending publishing delays.  This
is better than 99% of the other conlangs out there, most of whom never
came close to lasting 9 years, having serious proponents with several native
languages on 4 continents.

But we have never really had a period of the kind of significant growth that
made Esperanto a survivor, if not necessarily a success.  And we are
undoubtedly the most successful conlang ever that has never been published in
a book %^).

I may have more to say after reading the rest of your post offline.

lojbab