Danny wrote:
I've been trying to learn Lojban off and on for several years. I
recently subscribed to this mailing list in an attempt to keep myself
interested in the language.
There was a discussion about a week ago about how Lojban has changed
since Lojban for Beginners was written and I am curious as to why
nobody has bothered to updated the material.
Lojban has not changed since LfB was written.
There are two things going on.
1. While the language was baselined several years ago, we never
managed to come up with dictionary-quality definitions for the
cmavo. A committee called byfy was charged with this task, and has
been bogged down because it is difficult and somewhat boring.
Furthermore, the effort has identified parts of CLL and LfB that
are vague and/or confusing (and sometimes even contradictory), and
the byfy task has expanded to include making the necessary
clarifications.
2. At the same time, there are a couple of areas of the language
that some people have problems with. These problems are difficult
to explain to beginners, and most of the time don't cause any real
problem with communication. The byfy has considered solutions, but
nothing is final yet. Two particularly popular proposals, known
colloquially as "xorlo" and "the dot side" generated the most
debate. The xorlo proposal has drawn little opposition (until this
week) and has apparently been informally adopted by most people on
IRC, but it isn't official; there are proposals to make it official
right away without waiting for the rest of the byfy work to be
completed, and then the statement would be correct that "Lojban has
changed".
The problem is that when people are confused over something in the
two books, a xorlo supporter will explain things differently from a
user who uses the baseline language. To them, the language has
changed.
[ li'o ]
lojbab