On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:29 AM, Arnt Richard Johansen
<arj@nvg.org> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 05:46:55AM -0700, Lindar Greenwood wrote:
> I would like to express my issues with a few words, and I welcome
> responses which include either supporting statements or reasons (other
> than the ones previously mentioned) why I may just be
> confused/misguided/wrong/misunderstanding things/etc.
The overarching reason why I think neither the BPFK nor the wider Lojban community needs to worry about this is that the language is designed to be extensible. It is impossible to specify everything a person could ever want to talk about, so we provide the possibility of building new words, lujvo and fu'ivla, exactly like natural languages do.
> [...] We have plibu, ganti, and pinji, which are all
> non-gender-specific until we make a lujvo/tanru out of them, so we
> ought to be consistent.
As for consistency in gismu space: consistent with what? To paraphrase Borges, we can't agree on how the universe is structured, so we have no hope of coming up with a semantic system that has no room for improvement.
"But," I can hear you shouting, "why not make *these* few changes? They're necessary!" Well, there we come to the issue that you didn't want to talk about, namely stability and the inviolable baseline. Bear with me for a moment ...
Lojban exists because people wanted a Loglan that they could speak. People who are investing effort in learning something, anything, hate it when you change things so that what they learnt is no longer valid. The Loglan Institute's ready willingness to change the language out from under learners' feet is legendary in these circles. So we have always been very strongly motivated to not change the language if we could possibly help it.
Now this is, of course, the perspective of somewhat of an oldtimer. (I started learning Lojban after the CLL was published.) I would be greatly upset by having to re-learn the language, but I know that some people that have been along for longer than I speak very good Lojban, even though they learned the TLI version first. So it's possible to learn both versions.
I wonder what the opinion of the millennial Lojbanists are on stability? (If you first heard of Lojban after 2002, I'm talking to you.) Do you personally consider it important?
Count me (2004) as someone who considers stability important. The language, while imperfect, does not seem to be fatally flawed. Continuous adjustment makes old texts obsolete, & perhaps discourages learners (& teachers). [...] perfect [...] enemy [...] good.
Regarding Lindar's points nos. 1 & 3: If you don't like these words, you don't have to use them. It's legitimate to say {fetplibu} and {ra'i la espanias}. I can't stand cultural gismu/fu'ivla myself, even if I use them in texts for community consumption.
Regarding no. 2: You make a distinction between "intrinsic physical need" & "actual need" -- {nitcu} covers both of those.
Regarding no. 4: If these words were direly needed, they would have been coined by now. I'm surprised they haven't been, but whatever, they will be. We may all be huge nerds, but that does not mean that our personal priorities are the language's priorities. The community we have now is not the community we have always had or will always have.
mu'o mi'e komfo,amonan