[lojban] Re: How to spread the word

[Auke Booij <auke.booij@gmail.com>]

Then this jumps into my mind: we take:
-1 smartass (ie scientist)
-1 english scientific article
-1 big community who knows a lot about an invented language (guess which
one)
-some time (a month or three)
Then, the smartass is set to learn Lojban and then starts translating
the article. He/she will get thorough help from pro lojban speakers and
eventually a very good side-by-side comparison is made between the two
versions of the article, explaining how Lojban is better for this use
(or maybe not, in which case we'll have to invent a new language :P).
This can be posted online, and people can see how Lojban is better.
Applied comparison of English and Lojban will show to anyone why it is
better, while "advertisements" saying that lojban is simply better will
only make people sceptic. Of course, such an applied comparison doesn't
just need to be given for a scientific article, but can also be applied
to literature (explaining how certain feelings can be explained better
in lojban (right? :P)).

Also, in the open source development world a lot of projects tend to
have a "bug day": a day on which the community helps solving bugs en
masse. Only a few days ago (maybe even today? yesterday?), Ubuntu
admitted its project to fix their wiki documentation (en masse) failed
miserably, but most code fixing projects seem to help (even if it would
just be to 1. have new news 2. get attention to the fact that work needs
to be done). Maybe a similar setup can be made for the lojban community,
where for a certain amount of time per a certain amount of time a
well-prepared and well-organized goal will be tried to be achieved. For
example, translating a short poem. And then a longer poem. And then a
book. A word processor. Two word processors. I'm sure you have plenty of
imagination to think of better projects, but this is just the idea.

Any opinions?

PS: reading up on the characteristics of SPDs, I must admit that I... Oh
nevermind, I don't think you want to know.

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 21:27 +0000, Minimiscience wrote:
> de'i li 05 pi'e 09 pi'e 2008 la'o fy. Auke Booij .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> > I hope you didn't think of this yet, because that would suggest it's not
> > working.
> .skamyxatra
> 
> We've already thought of this, in a way.  Most Lojban propaganda emphasises its
> potential usefulness for writing scientific & Mathematical papers, and some
> other fields, such as law, have also been mentioned as potential benefactors of
> the language.  However, as far as I can tell, the problem isn't that it's not
> working.  The problem is that *no one who knows Lojban truly cares about it*.
> 
> No one is actually passionate about the language to the point of being willing
> to make some great contribution and carry it through to the end.  The committee
> in charge of ironing out the language recently sent out an e-mail asking for a
> taskmaster in the hopes of getting around their "serious lack of momentum."
> Almost all of the few original Lojban works attempted have either been very
> short or else have been abandoned part of the way through (e.g., {la nicte
> cadzu}).  The Lojban main page has two news items on it: one from March of this
> year and one from May of last year.  The most frequently cited excuse for
> failure to get around to working on a Lojban project is that it's not high
> enough on one's list of priorities.  Huge swathes of the tiki are out of date,
> and the dictionary may never be completed.  The Lojban portion of Wikipedia
> (yes, people have been translating it) has 688 pages, 564 of which are "{na
> mulno}" (stubs, not complete).  Either Lojban attracts people with schizoid
> personality disorder, or else the language is simply lacking in any features to
> capture people's imagination and keep it captured long enough for them to
> spread the joy to others.
> 
> I've been holding in that thought for a while.  If anyone disagrees, the best
> way to disprove me is to do something truly great & labor-intensive for Lojban.
> 
> mu'omi'e la'o gy. Minimiscience .gy.
> 



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