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Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2002 01:33:11 +0300
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To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Subject: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism
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From: Robin Turner <lojban-out@lojban.org>
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I won't include Lojbab's post for space reasons, but it is fundamentally 
correct.  There isn't such a sharp distinction between natural and 
constructed languages as one may think (Modern Turkish, Greek and Hebrew 
are examples of partially-constructed natlangs) but Lojbab's point that 
language drift occurs in different ways in conlangs and natlangs is 
valid.  Natlangs evolve by people coining new usage without thinking 
about it - primarily in vocabulary, but also, more slowly, in syntax 
(e.g. the blurring of the distinction between stative and action verbs 
and quasi-Altaic final negative in Teenage American English - "I am so 
believing this, not").  Conlangs evolve by people having ideas about 
what the language should do - the closest parallel in natlangs was the 
move to Latinise English (e.g. by banning split infinitives).  

Lojban may eventually start to evolve in the way natlangs do, but that 
can only occur in a genuine way when there is a large body of 
quasi-native speakers, and this cannot happen if people start tinkering 
with the language.  There may be some innovations that could be made in 
the grammar, and there may be call for some new gismu and cmavo (in 
fact, space has been left for that), but now is not the time. 
 Personally, I have enough trouble keeping track of the the grammar that 
exists to even start eploring its more rarified possibilities, and I 
have never found a concept that I was unable to coin a lujvo for 
(admittedly, some of those lujvo were pretty long - but the same applied 
when I tried to translate "descriptive fallacy" into Turkish).

On the subject of fundamentalism, the CLL is the ultimate authority on 
Lojban usage, not.  The ultimate authority is the BNF grammar + the 
gismu list + the cmavo list.  The CLL simply exists to make this 
understandable to carbon-based life-forms.  Incidentally, I was talking 
to a philosophically-inclined computer scientist some years back about 
Lojban.  His comment: "You've got a BNF grammar?  That is so cool!"

robin.tr

-- 
"We do not imprison ourselves with laws, or impoverish ourselves with money" - Iain Banks

Robin Tunrer
IDMYO
Bilkent Universitesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin