From nicholas@uci.edu Mon Sep 17 00:09:29 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 17 Sep 2001 07:09:29 -0000 Received: (qmail 85608 invoked from network); 17 Sep 2001 00:02:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 17 Sep 2001 00:02:55 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 17 Sep 2001 00:02:55 -0000 Received: from [128.195.186.219] (dialin53a-22.ppp.uci.edu [128.195.186.32]) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id RAA13707 for ; Sun, 16 Sep 2001 17:02:54 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: nicholas@e4e.oac.uci.edu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 17:07:05 -0700 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying) From: Nick Nicholas X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 10779 cu'u la xod >I don't know what Nick means when he says Lojban will never succeed. >Although Nick is a supreme Lojbanist, some of his opinions, like his >hatred of rafsi, are his alone. *shrug* On rafsi, it's clear to me that its easy to confuse them, because too there are too many rafsi around. Not the only that's said so, sorry: http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?Desirability%20of%20rafsi As you'll find, individuals can think individual parts of Lojban misfeatures, without necessarily condemning the whole effort. There's a lot of this, and that's why the baseline is so desperately guarded --- different people, unfortunately, think different parts of Lojban misfeatures. As for the ultimate success of Lojban, this is part of a larger rhetorical battle, which I will not do justice here. There are two conflicting goals for Lojban: to remain logical, unambiguous, computer-parsable, etc., and to be human-speakable, learnable, expressive, etc. I do think Lojban cannot ultimately remain rigorous in all things. Pretty much everyone does. For those interested in the logic side of Lojban, this will prove a failure --- but an interesting failure, and the extent to which logic and rigour *can* be maintained in Lojban is also interesting. For those not so interested, the logical-minded are tilting at windmills anyway, and the effort to keep Lojban logical is misguided as a result. That's my take; you'll hear a separate take from xod, because we're rhetorical adversaries on this. :-) (xod, if you think I'm caricaturing, please feel free to step in.) You'll certainly hear a separate take from Lojban Central (i.e. Lojbab, speaking ex cathedra), which is that Lojban is to evolve naturally, with no impediment. A major function of the wiki is in fact to document a lot of the underlying claims, ideologies, and terminology. It may be involved to navigate, but it is the best we have right now for a document of record. Any one person writing this stuff down in a web page might do it more compactly, but it will be a lot harder to let everyone be heard that way. An added problem is that there's traffic to and from the Wiki and the List. The elephant, for example, was discussed pretty much only on the Wiki. Nick Nicholas, UCI, USA. nicholas@uci.edu http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis "Must I, then, be the only one to be beheaded now?" "Why, did you want everybody to be beheaded for your consolation?" Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.