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

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

This is from And Rosta, in response to both my essay and in
particular me showing him the email I quote at the top:

  Thanks -- for drawing my attention to your very interesting essay
  & for drawing my attention to my old message. I guess that if the
  views expressed in your essay had held sway back when I was
  involved with Lojban, I would have stayed involved (at least when
  the demands of Real Life allowed). When it comes to matters of
  linguistic analysis and insight and the like, Xorxes's is the
  smartest mind I've encountered outside the world of professional
  linguistics. He also has extraordinary patience and perseverance
  and good humour.

  My thinking was/is:
  A. Your #1 and #2 goals were paramount: the language should be
  capable of expressing desired meanings unambiguously, and without
  so much effort that the cost of the effort outweighs the benefit
  of the clarity of expression. B. It would be a real benefit for
  the world for this language to exist and seriously be usable for
  real-world stuff (such as legislative language). C. To create the
  language you'd need a team -- too much work for one person, and
  the job would need many eyes. D. With the benefit of hindsight,
  and learning from the Lojban experience, the best way to achieve
  (A) would be to start from scratch. (Lojban grammar is needlessly
  complicated, and the design of its grammar and of its morphology
  makes it impossible to get it down to an acceptable level of
  conciseness.)

  (B) & (C) were in conflict with (D). So I both worked for Lojban
  and thought about how to best to do (A). Eventually it became
  clear to me not only that (A) was not going to happen to Lojban
  but also that the very attempt to turn Lojban into an (A)-type
  language was upsetting people with just as much of a stake and
  investment in Lojban as I had. So I withdrew, and straightaway my
  levels of free time rose and my levels of stress fell (tho Life
  soon reversed those changes!).

  It would be great news if at long last Lojban could officially
  follow your manifesto, which in practice would amount to
  incorporating the changes Xorxes would make to it. That would at
  least make Lojban as good as it could ever be.

  Keep me posted on developments -- I'm still interested in it all,
  even though I have much less time than I once upon a time did.

-Robin

-- 
They say:  "The first AIs will be built by the military as weapons."
And I'm  thinking:  "Does it even occur to you to try for something
other  than  the default  outcome?"  See http://shrunklink.com/cdiz
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ *** http://www.lojban.org/

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