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Re: [lojban] Summary: Cultural fu'ivla

Christopher Doty wrote:
I just wanted to sort of condense what we have been talking about here in a more compact fashion. Essentially, the idea would be to (I've ordered the list logically, not temporally):
1) Chuck the cultural gismu (this seems to be an idea that has been around for awhile anyway, we just need good replacements).
2) Develop a new, much smaller set of gismu to cover things that were previously included in the cultural gismu, such as reflecting language/cultural/nationality in some respect.
3) For countries/territories: develop fu'ivla for the member states of the UN, along with other "important" areas (importance being based on an as-yet undetermined criterion).
4) For languages: develop fu'ivla based on the ISO code for the languages present in the 639-1 set of codes, but using their code as of the 639-3 revision. (I think it would be cool to use the language family codes, as presented here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-2#Collective_language_codes), when filling out the fu'ivla.)
5) For religions: develop gismu that cover the world's major religions (probably with some artificial cut-off for number of adherents), (along with another couple gismu for "atheist" and something like "native beliefs/practices of x2"?)
6) For land masses: develop fu'ivla for either the seven continents as conventionally understood, or else for the major tectonic plates (which largely correlates with the continents, but leads to a bit more precision with a few more fu'ivla). If we did go the plate route, we'd have to again have some sort of artificial cut-off TBD. 

Hopefully that summary accurately represents the discussion thus far.

Since it seems like this project has stagnated in the past,
It has not stagnated. It has been rejected. It will continue to be rejected.
The gismu are baselined. The baseline isn't going to be changed because someone doesn't like something or thinks it could have been done better. We are more than 15 years past the point where people were willing to even consider changing the list.
We officially and expressly DON'T want the language redesigned by fiat, in whole or in part. This isn't supposed to be a language design project any more, but a language-using project. (Bearing in mind that the byfy work defining the cmavo has never been completed, but there is a strong bias even there against change).
The goal is to turn the baselined language over to users, who will *use* the language, which will then evolve according to actual usage. There will cease to be a language prescription, in favor of language description.
If people need a gismu that doesn't exist, they can of course invent one ad hoc, though the intent is that they invent fu'ivla, and only a demonstrably useful fu'ivla would ever be made into a gismu (there is provision that assigning gismu might be done officially at some future point, but only after seeing a pattern of actual usage).
Fu'ivla space is up for grabs, and people can choose to systematically create fu'ivla. If you limit your project to that, I certainly won't fight it (but I don't promise to ever support it either). 

> But,
before I do any of that, I'd like to make sure that a) people seem generally of the opinion that some change like this is probably a good idea, 

20 years ago, it might have been.  Not now.
My apologies if this comes across as rude, but I don't know how to put it any more politely. The question has been repeatedly debated, and even though there have always been people VERY unhappy with the cultural gismu, whatever may be wrong with them is not important enough to change LLG's fundamental philosophy about the language ("strong baseline" and "let usage decide"). 

lojbab

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