From a.rosta@lycos.co.uk Mon Dec 02 03:02:38 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@lycos.co.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_3_0); 2 Dec 2002 11:02:37 -0000 Received: (qmail 80510 invoked from network); 2 Dec 2002 11:02:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.216) by m9.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 2 Dec 2002 11:02:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lmsmtp03.st1.spray.net) (212.78.202.113) by mta1.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 2 Dec 2002 11:02:37 -0000 Received: from oemcomputer (host81-7-58-125.surfport24.v21.co.uk [81.7.58.125]) by lmsmtp03.st1.spray.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5EA7F3CF43 for ; Mon, 2 Dec 2002 12:02:36 +0100 (MET) To: Subject: improvement (was: RE: Loglan Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 11:04:46 -0000 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.0.20021201182011.0312d120@pop.east.cox.net> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 Importance: Normal From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=122260811 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 17362 Lojbab: > There are thus a relatively enormous (compared to either of the > two "active" communities) number of what Steven Belknap called "sleeper > cells" or rather "sleeper individuals" out there many of whom are waiting > for what JCB never delivered, and we are close to delivering: a "completed" > language that they can learn without fear of the powers that be changing it > yet again for purposes of "improvement" (a symptom that has killed so many > artificial languages and their communities in the last hundred years that > you would think that we'd learn something by now) Some Lojbanists are interested in the whorfian experiment, so don't care about improvement. Other people are attracted to Lojban precisely because we are reaping the benefits of earlier improvement. For those people I guess there is a trade-off between improvement and the hassle of relearning. Each individual will judge the trade-off differently, partly depending, I imagine, on how much they've learnt already. But we should not speak of improvement with contempt, since had there never been any, most of us would not be here now. --And.