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Re: [lojban] morphology



At 12:18 PM 12/1/01 -0500, Pierre Abbat wrote:
There will have to be some sort of arbitration about new brivla, to prevent
one new word from getting two incompatible meanings.

No, there doesn't HAVE to be such an arbitration. There is a RISK if there is no arbitration that different people will come up with different meanings, but that risk will exist even if there is arbitration, because not all users will read and follow the dictates of the arbitrators (look at all the unofficial gismu that people use; inevitably there will be a conflict).

There has been a debate since the early 80s about whether there should be a Loglan Academy. TLI has one; LLG does not. French has one; English does not. It seems to be an ideological thing whether people want there to be someone with the authority to tell them what to do.

The status quo is that Lojban will have no academy. We will produce a baseline dictionary, but it makes no pronouncements on any word that is not in it, and the likelihood now is that it will primarily have words that have seen significant and agreed upon usage. We have no restrictions on anyone else producing unofficial dictionaries or lists of brivla with their opinions, but there is no mechanism for arbitrating if two unofficial people disagree. The only time when there is arbitration therefore is whenever there is an official dictionary edition put out that will include a particular word, and that arbitration counts only insofar as the official dictionary is considered a prescriptive standard, which is doubtful once the baseline period ends.

lojbab
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lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org