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Re: [lojban] mistakes

Stela Selckiku, On 22/10/2010 14:26:

2010/10/22 Jorge Llambías<jjllambias@gmail.com>:


But of course it's allowed to make mistakes in Lojban! How could it
not be? The only people who make no mistakes are those that don't ever
use the language.


Well that was the rule, for years!  No one was allowed to speak
Lojban.  Not without weathering severe criticism, anyway!


I've been around since 1990 or 1991. For all the time that I've been around, speakers and writers of Lojban have been feted and lauded. Severe criticism was reserved only for those who either knowingly departed from the baseline or adhered to the baseline but violated usage conventions (by writing in a sui generis style). It's true that mistakes were invariably corrected, but scrupulous and finicky correction of mistakes is not severe criticism.

I hear it was even worse before I was involved, like the Loglan days.
I read something the other day about how everyone sent their attempts
at Loglan to JCB, and he just didn't send them on to anyone else
because he didn't think they were good enough, they were all just
hidden away, and like one person wrote a text and published it anyway
but JCB was furious!  Is that really what it was like, oldbies?


I've never been involved with Loglan, but I can certainly sympathisize with the desire to suppress, or at least conceal, most usage. Maybe things have improved, but at least for the duration of the 90s, Lojban usage was absolutely execrable, comparable perhaps to the average Anglo schoolchild's command of French (or whatever foreign language they learn at school). I am here measuring execrability by the distance and discrepancy between the meaning of what is said and the meaning that the speaker intends to communicate. I guess xorlo has gone a long way to fixing a lot of this. But at any rate, if almost your entire corpus of usage consists of the usage of incompetent foreign-like speakers, I would have thought it should be deprecated rather than worshipped, though everybody else in my day seemed to take the opposite view.

--And.

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