stability of the language

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>I don't know about that.  I know from now that I won't like some things
>that will very likely appear in the dictionary, e.g if you say that
>{tcesau} means "ancient" instead of "intimate".  Everybody will hate
>some parts of the dictionary, and the parts that everybody agrees to
>hate will remain only in the dictionary and never be used.  In the case
>of Lojban, what probably will tend to remain more "standard" is the
>grammar, but the meanings of gismu and its places probably will shift
>somewhat once people start learning them and not looking them up.

At some point when we are fully out of the precription business.  I or
some other lexicographer can come along and look at actual usage, and
say "hmm, no one ever seems to have used the x3 place of broda".  They
can then look at the corpus of broda usages, and see if there was no
implied place for all such usages.  If the weight of evidence is strong
enough, the lexicographer might indeed decide to drop the x3 place from
the dictionary.  Given that word meanings don't generally change
overnight, i don't expect these kinds of decisions to be made in the 2nd
edition of a Lojban dictionary.  But there WILL come a time (we hope and
assume) that usage starts telling us what the language is rather than
analysis.

lojbab