Robin Lee Powell wrote:
On Wed, Apr 07, 2010 at 04:05:56AM -0400, Bob LeChevalier wrote:Lojban needs to remain stable and resistant to change, especially in the near term. When numbers of Lojbanists and formal documentation are both strong enough, then "improvements" will generally be made by usage, not by fiat, with skilled Lojbanists being the only ones having the capability to demonstrate and explain their variant usages in-language, and other skilled Lojbanists voting-with-their-usage to adopt the variation.The problem is this will never, ever happen. Knowing Lojbanists as I do, what would actually happen is we'd argue about things and then decide what to adopt explicitely, and *then* go out and use it. This is very much not anything like real language drift, which is what you seem to have in mind.
Actually I think it is, although most language drift changes take place without the debate. But clearly the replacement of "-man" by "-person" in many English words, and the loss of the traditional use of the word "gay" are examples of language drift that was strongly influenced by debate. Some people have tried to implement gender-neutral third person pronouns, usually with some amount of debate or explanation. Some use them without explanation and somehow are understood anyway. Any attempt to actually make such a pronoun "standard" would however cause enormous acrimonious debate.
In your scenario, if the arguments were taking place solely in Lojban, and decision to adopt was informal and applied only to those who agreed to adopt it and they then used it, setting examples for the rest of us to either emulate or ignore, then I cannot imagine anything better.
If I ever "adopt" xorlo in my own work, it will almost certainly be because I unconsciously do so based on exemplary usages by others.
Depending on what the change was, and who did the adopting, I would imagine that byfy would certify text written with the change either as II.3 (baseline-compliant with minor variants) or III (LLG approved author). Of course, level IV usage needs no approval.
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