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Date:         Thu, 8 Feb 1996 18:27:40 -0800
Reply-To: Gerald Koenig <jlk@NETCOM.COM>
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From: Gerald Koenig <jlk@NETCOM.COM>
Subject:      Re: tech: logic matters (CLD)
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To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
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(large deletion)

Dave Barton:

>
>Now, the lesson of this is not that consensus is good and that a
>standardization committee (academy) is bad.  It is that you need to
>select the process that fits your needs.  Consensus would have never
>created the VHDL standard in the first place (in spite of the entire
>community crying out for a standard of some sort), and I belive that
>the new restandardization is likely to be closer to the mark.  The
>question is, which of these cases best fits the needs of Lojban.
>
>In my opinion (and only my opinion), the consensus approach is better
>for our purposes.  If we start from a solid baseline (I may be new,
>but from what I have read in the reference grammar, the present
>baseline qualifies), then we *want* official pronouncements to be
>conservative, but groundswell changes to be applied.  For one thing, a
>conservative official corpus gives people an unmoving target to aim at
>for teaching and learning.  And asking for groundswell for changes
>means that more people will be speaking the language, and that changes
>will reflect the needs of the *speakers*, not the language design
>committee (academy).  It seems to me that these are the
>characteristics we want out of a change process for Lojban.
>
>All of the above is my own opinion only, as a newcomer to the
>community.  Please regard it as such.
>

You may be a newcomer, but to me it sounds as though you have the right
background and experience to address the issue of language change.  I
regard myself as politically naive about language standardization, and
your experience on real design committees and in real functioning
democratic groups speaks volumes.  When I coined the term Committe for
Language Design for this thread, I meant it as a catch all phrase for
some mechanism to actually build consensus and to establish a
connection between disjoint parts of this community. I find myself in
substantial agreement with your views.  When I began this thread it was
from the premise that the instability and failure-to-thrive of
constructed languages stems from a lack of democratic process, and as
to the form that process should take, I am open minded. Thanks so much
for sharing your experience.

djer


>
>                                        Dave Barton <*>
>                                        dlb@wash.inmet.com )0(
>                                        http://www.inmet.com/~dlb
>