Re: Loglan still alive?

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 11:24 PM 2/17/99 +0200, Avital Oliver/biOmass wrote:
>From: Avital Oliver/biOmass <biomass@hempseed.com>
>
>>>From what I understood from the Lojban site, Loglan is dead, except for
>a private version JCB is planning.
>
>Yet I see a Lojban site being updated all the time, and there existing
>such a thing as "the Loglan institute"? If it still exists, why did
>Lojban break apart from Loglan? And, how many speaking of Loglan are
>there said to be?

The Loglan Institute is JCB's organization, whose governance is such that
JCB has total control and a veto on all decisions.  They have a Web page,
but looking just now I see little that has changed from the last time I
looked, though the pages have recent "update dates".  (Our pages don't
change because we already have copious information out there and don't have
much new to say.)

You can find a more detailed explanation of the history of the splitup on
the Lojban Web site.  But briefly, the fight was over whetehr the language
was intellectual property of JCB and his organization, or whether he had
put it into the public domain either explicitly or implicitly.  There had
been demands for royalties from all usage of the language. After the split,
we estimate that 90% of the then-community went with Lojban, with most of
the continuing TLI supporters being fence-sitters publically (my wife, the
first "member" of TLI outside JCB's close friends, remains a paid up member
of TLI for another 5 years or more, by which time it may not matter any more).

There was a legal battle in the US, which we won.  We have the right to
call our language Loglan as much as he does his, to advertise using
"Loglan" (useful given that many have heard of it from either Scientific
American or Robert Heinlein's SF novels), and to refer to the research
project we continue to advocate as "The Loglan Project".  Equally
importantly, we stopped an endless series of legal threats.

At the time of the split, TLI was indeed effectively dead.  Spurred by our
initial success, JCB accelerated production of a new edition of his book
which he published in 1989.  We don't know how many copies have been sold,
but the number is not enormous even though he is selling at half the price
of our book, having published in paperback.  Almost certainly well under
1000 in 10 years and he probably spent as much as he has taken in on a
single month's advertisement in Scientific American several years ago.


TLI has been able survive and maybe even to take in more money than LLG,
because they sell "memberships" that offer no special benefits for $50
every couple of years, and because JCB is retired but still has substantial
royalty income from the board game "Careers" that he invented.  Meanwhile,
we have sold almost all Lojban materials at cost (the book we are selling
for $39 cost us around $18K to print 1500 copies; we still owe half of
this, and cannot publish a dictionary until we sell enough copies to pay
off the debt).

However, we believe that TLI's support is smaller than ours, and far less
active.  It is hard to determine, since more TLI work is carried on in
private email whereas almost everything we do as an organization is on
Lojban List.  But except for a recent flurry of around 2 dozen messages
spurred by one single TLI recruit, TLI's public mailing list probably
doesn't have 2 dozen messages per year.  There is no particular evidence
that more than a dozen people write in the language

More importantly, TLI Loglan's activity is TOTALLY dependent on JCB and
TLI.  TLI ceases activity and all that remains is a website with incomplete
language information, and TLI is almost meaningless without JCB.  Lojban
probably still depends on LLG, but the complete information is on the net,
and there is some considerable chance that LLG or some equivalent could
survive without me; I'm also only 45 and still in good health.

The bottom line is that JCB is around 78 years old now, and has no
effective plan to keep his language alive after he dies.  He has tried at
least 3 times to retire from project leadership or bring up new leadership
to share the workload, but each time has ended up in a power struggle after
perceived slights from one of the heirs apparent, taking back power.  He
appears to be trying again now to retire, so at the very least I expect TLI
to be less dynamic in the next few years than it has been.  TLI Loglan will
continue to exist, but I think has little future.  It remains private
intellectual property according to JCB's claims.

Meanwhile, there has been spoken conversation in Lojban for years, albeit
less than fluent.  The better speakers do not need a dictionary to sustain
conversation.  There has also been Lojban conversation on IRC and though
slower, via Lojban List (Jorge, Goran, and a couple of others once kept a
conversation thread going for around 3 months of at least daily postings
totally in Lojban).  We have an annual gathering here, and we expect there
to be more Lojban spoken at LogFest in the next few years. Written Lojban
text in my archives is measured in megabytes.  

Lojbanists are more international than TLI Loglanists, with maybe 30% of
our support outside the US, and a higher percentage of our active support.
Our best speakers include Jorge Llambias of Argentina, Nick Nicholas of
Australia, Goran Topic of Croatia, Ivan Derzhanski of Bulgaria, Veijo Vilva
of Finland, and Colin Fine of England.  Our snail mailing list, if I ever
get it updated, will likely be close to 1500 people.

Our weak link remains me.  I am a parent very involved in raising my kids,
and don't have very organized work habits, so things get laid aside for
weeks at a time.  My main priority is to get book orders caught up (I have
fallen behind again), and get our records in order.  At the moment, I am
spending a couple hours a day on matters Lojbanic but the pile of paper is
deep, and too little is on computer where it needs to be.

But unlike TLI, Lojban List and LLG seems to be going and growing without
my activity, and without any significant organized promotion of the
language.  You who read Lojban List are our "advertisers" and we get 1 or 2
book orders and new subscribers every week solely by word of mouth.

lojbab