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Re: Proscriptivity (was Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language))



Robin Lee Powell wrote:
lojbab wants both.  A revised baseline to serve as (A), followed
by "naturalization" a la (B).

Unfortunately (I guess), the community has pretty strongly stated
its preference for not-(B) (myself included).  I've gotten to the
point that I don't *ever* want a naturally evolving Lojban, because
it will almost immediately lose all the qualities that make me want
to speak it.  The response to the "you're doing it wrong" thread
makes it clear that the (vast?) majority of the current community
feels the same way.

As an amusing side note, several of us *did* notice a drift in usage
vs. the CLL that was decently widespread: we believed that UI ru'e <
UI < UI sai < UI cai, but in fact bare UI is (semantically! :)
ambiguous.  The relevant point is that everybody who was treating it
as fixed, when shown the CLL part in question, went "Oh, I was doing
it wrong; oops" and not "Well, I guess the book is wrong because
most of us were doing it the other way".

That's fine by me.

My desire to have (A) as well as (B) is so that (A) will naturally serve as a check on too rapid and unnecessary drift via (B). Because constructed languages like Lojban don't have a large usage base or a long history, in areas where the language is NOT explicitly defined, natural evolution probably takes place exceptionally quickly (I almost said "unnaturally quickly" which would be a self-contradiction %^).

Even with CLL defined, I suspect that there have been real natural changes in the language since 1997 ("natural" meaning to exclude changes like xorlo that were instigated intentionally to cause change). You've identified one that was caught, but there are probably numerous others that aren't direct contradictions of anything in CLL but are different from whatever was conceived of in the design.

I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own
vocabulary knowledge.

It may well be that for any meaning you want to express, you have
a way of expressing it and find that others will understand you.

Which is ultimately what language is all about.

Are you saying I'm fat?

Who would I be to say something like that?

*Thank* you.  :)

You're welcome, doi jatna noi mibyja'a zo'o

mi'e lojbab

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