[lojban] [lojban-beginners] [lojban-announcements] Essay on the future of Lojban, with a simple poll for the community.

[Christopher Doty <suomichris@gmail.com>]

I, too, somewhat disagree with the question... If Lojban is indeed
intended to be "logical," then I am hard-pressed to understand how, if
improvement is apparent, one would disagree with said improvement.  It
seems a more basic question, one to ask before this one, would be "Do
you believe that Lojban could be improved if any number of changes
were implemented?" And perhaps, also, "Would the benefits of these
improvements outweigh the possible issues (relearning,
back-compatibility, etc.)?"

Having said that, though, I think that the general sentiment of the
essay is sound: Lojban should, absolutely, be controlled by a central
authority.  Letting the language grow on it's own means that it will,
if widely picked up, fracture into a bunch of dialects--consider the
issue of naming languages which is currently being discussed on the
list.  Although it might seem minor to some, it is pretty essential to
have clear names for all of the languages from my point of view.  If
Lojban is ever to be adopted internationally as a means of
communication, how exactly would that work if people are making up
words on an ad hoc basis, as was suggested earlier?

Consider an example: because Lojban provides clear predicate places
for gismu, I think it would be great to use in glossing basic terms
from a bunch of languages for cross-comparison and, by extension, as a
medium for publishing scholarship about languages--except that, if
everyone is making up names of languages as they go along, how the
hell am I supposed to find papers on the languages I am interested in?
As in currently stands, there are a bunch of languages that have
multiple names, usually with some older and some newer, and I can tell
you that is is very annoying to have to do multiple searches to find
these things.  Why are we expecting that people will just pick up
certain words? What about anything written before people start to
settle on a given term??

I will also say that, as a linguist, I am going to nitpicking about a
couple of things since this issue has come up--I think there is
various room for linguistic improvement, as it's pretty clear that
there wasn't a ton of linguistic involvement in the creation of the
language. Although most everything is sound, there are a couple things
that just don't/won't work, and I think it is worth considering them.
Gismu with more than four places is the example that jumps immediately
to mind, but there are other minor things that will, linguistically,
interfere with Lojban being adopted internationally.......

On Monday, April 5, 2010, Oren  wrote:
> "I disagree with the survey statement.
>
> I agree with your essay in its entirety. Thank you so much for it.
>
> -Eppcott"
>
> .i mi cu tugni la'oi Eppcott .i ni'o co'o mi'e korbi
>
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