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

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Luke Bergen wrote:
> Just to clarify, we're not talking about huge re-constructional changes 
> here are we?  We're talking about things like xorlo and dotside.  If I 
> have to re-learn the gismu that I know now and re-understand a new tense 
> system, I would change my vote.  But as I suspect that what RLPowell is 
> talking about is nothing so drastic as all that, I'm ok with change.

I see nothing in Robin's proposal that restricts the degree of change 
that could be permitted. backwards-compatability is 4th among 4 goals, 
and the other three are sufficiently broad in scope that it likely would 
never come into play (indeed, "unlike other languages" sounds like a 
guaranteed force for huge-reconstructional change).

Imposing a well-defined but unique tonal system using a 
Unicode-compatible but utterly weird alphabet would seem to ideally fit 
all of the first three goals.

So adopting his proposal means accepting whatever the powers that be 
decide meets the criteria, and hoping for their goodwill.  Robin may be 
a good guy who would never abuse the authority, but he is only one 
person.  We don't know that the byfy of 5 years from now will even 
include Robin (or that he won't be outvoted by his own 80% rule as a 
result of someone packing the vote - since anyone who wants to can 
apparently be part of byfy and vote).

If we were at the point where all such discussion of change was taking 
place only in Lojban, and byfy was doing its work only in Lojban, I 
would be far less worried.

lojbab

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