Message-Id: <199602020658.BAA09088@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Fri, 2 Feb 1996 00:03:18 -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: CLD
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR
Content-Length: 3434

>Surely lojbab does not believe that the language will be
>complete at initial baselining!

From the standpoint of prescription, it will be.  Those unofficial slang
usages you talk about will perhaps get used, and after 5 years, IF LLG or
someone else chooses, they can set up such a committee as you describe, and
debate making some or all "slang" usages official.  Of course approving them
will undoubtedly require that they be machine parsable.  At the time such
a committee is set up, presumably rules will be set up as to what will be
 considered, and what procedures are needed.

> What is the argument *against* such
>a deliberative body?

Nothing, once it has something to deliberate.  I do NOT want any "official"
deliberation of changes tot he language to take place during the initial
baseline period, because the mere existence of such a committee deliberating
changes makes it explicit that such changes are planned, and hence seriously
spoils the psychological commitment that the baseline is intended to make.
It makes it clear NOT that the prescriptive phase is done, but that some
group of people are convinced that the language is incomplete, and will need
improvements imposed from on high, and that further prescription will be
attempted.  The more that a central body seems to be controlling the
language, the more that people will feel that the language belongs NOT to
the speakers, but to this endless chain of tinkerers and deliberators.
And that is morally opposite our initial premise in setting up LLG.

In his first published writings, JCB said "Make Loglan your own".  He went on
to say that this included experimentation, devising new words and usages, and
he strongly implied that there were no limits.  By 1984, he had gone to the
other extreme, and now ONLY changes approved by the TLI Loglan Academy are
"part of the language",a nd the language is intellectual property of TLI.
We set up LLG to revert to JCB's initial commitment to the community, and I
cannot and will not go back on that commitment.

Come publication time, the language is NO LONGER LLG's, and we have no more
right to control it than the community chooses to grant us.  And if we
continue to act like we are and intend to be in control, most people, as
they did for JCB, will simply acquiesce and act like it IS still LLG's baby.
But the language will become alive ONLY if people "make Loglan/Lojban
their own".

We have the hsitory of the Esperanto project to show that this CAN work,
and we have Volpu:k, and TLI Loglan to show us that the alternative is
NOT likely to work.  Meanwhile, we have a highly adaptive and somewhat more
successful than us Klingon community that exists with an incomplete language
prescription, and still having reasonable cohesiveness, even though the
prescription is only a fraction as complete as Lojban's.  Every language
that has NOT managed to officially terminate the right of fiddlers to
deliberate and make changes has failed.

After 5 years, if there seems to be need for some further prescriptive
work, then people can debate doing so, hopefully in Lojban.  The people who
are qualified will be the ones who are using the language THEN, and not those
of us who are pontificating about it now.  I feel that neither I nor LLG-present
nor anyone else has any right to bind a community so distant from what it is
now, by political decision-making taht none of them would have a say in.

lojbab