| I am not adverse to suggesting changes even in these frozen times and intend
to continue to do so, but I am often relieved to find that they are already solved in unexplored corners of the language or by rethinking the problem. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that what we have so far in teaching aids are often not the place to find these secret bits, but rather the usage of the few people who do use the language a lot -- though even they sometimes do violence to what little does seem to be clear. Now, spread over a number of threads -- and hidden away in threads ostensively on some other topic altogether -- we have several lines of attack on the present system of Lojban. One line is to suggest that there are all sorts of things that Lojban doesn't do or doesn't do well, although, for each problem suggested, at least some serious users claim to see a way to do it and one that is neither baroque (in the Lojban context anyhow) nor even significantly longer or more complex than the proposed change/addition. Another line is to suggest that there are large parts of frozen Lojban that are so ill-defined that the freeze is essentially meaningless. The evidence for this is just that several different users use the same item in incompatible ways while all appealing apparently accurately to the same "standard." A third line insists that these "problems" arise only because the propounders do not "live in Lojban" enough and so have biased views of what the language can and cannot do. They show this by carrying on their discussion in English, of course. A fourth line see the problem as educational, to find an extremely introductory textbook that provides just enough to start a bootstrap operation (one of JCB's favorite concepts) whereby one can know enough Lojban to ask question in Lojban about how to go on to the next step in Lojban, say. Well, writing any text book is a bitching awful job and an introductory language one more so than most -- especially when you have no culture to fall back on, as you would with a nat lang. So, maybe Nick's appeals to a more sophisticated lot than the average intake from TrekNet, but then, so does Lojban, and so we can probably make some progress with it until the next version comes along. An Cowan's Book is said not to be for teaching but for recording and so it accurately records some of the glitches of creation: things put in because they seemed to fit a pattern, even if it was not quite clear what they did there; things left out from haste or because someone didn't undertand it; things differently described in different places because different stages of history were never reconciled; and so on. So there is clearly room for creativity -- even innovation -- within the baselined language. And an agreed-upon (with exceptions of course) method for coming to a decision by consensus of usage. Hopefully out of this may yet grow that community that discusses its problems with Lojban in Lojban. But that will take some time, for the simple reason that there are enough uncertainties about simple things that we cannot yet formulate the question in Lojban -- nor the answers either -- let alone the arguments for one answer rather than another (look at most of the attempts in this direction). But that does not mean that Lojban cannot be used for a wide range of other things (Greek got good at talking about Greek only after Homer, Hesiod, the Attic tragedians, the Old and Middle Comedians, Plato, Thucidides, and so on -- a mass of data at least.) Robin's and now Nick's story is clearly on the right track, whatever may be said about the discussions that go with it (or, indeed, about the details of the language used). After a certain point, you can't do language design in a vacuum from language use (well, you can -- as witness the Institute for many years, but you never get a real language out of it). So write a nice story -- or translate one, create a literature (and, at least by implication, a culture) for Lojban, against which to start making linguistic judgments. How do you say it? Well, what does it mean functionally in Lojbankuln? How would you say that? And use the unclear ones; that's how they become clear -- after the battle of clarifications. |