As a long-time, and generally outside, observer of Lojban, I encourage you to get into the language more fully. The basics are easy and satisfying, the details perhaps less so.
But to your questions. Officially, Lojban is not in a state of flux. It is the language of CLL with a few long-established corrections. It will remain that until the completion of the mythical baseline, after which suggestions for change will be entertained. To be sure, the committee for establishing the baseline does not appear to have met for many years, has not recently (if ever)
released a report or made a survey, and, indeed, may not be constituted at the moment. In its absence -- and before it was constituted, indeed, since the moment of creation of Lojban -- people have been suggesting changes, "improvements", and using these non-standard forms freely, with or without the cooperation or understanding of other Lojbanists. Some of these innovations have been generally, sometimes even quasi-officially, accepted. Along with CLL, these latter few are worth knowing.
One such is clearly dot-side, the requirement that every name be completely surrounded by pauses to distinguish it from other structures which may have the same form -- and to remove some technical phonetic restrictions on names in
CLL.
On the other hand, the reduction in the number of connectives and the collapse of the class of cmevla to the class of brivla are not established even though, for the second, the difference is essentially terminological and, for the first, is a desirable goal for both simplification and logical clarity.
The various ways of doing stress (only in names, of course, since stress is otherwise fixed) are mainly matters of personal aesthetics. Just know the possibilities and act accordingly. I don't think it
will ever be a Lojban style to use capital letters purely to indicate proper nouns or the like; this is adequately handled phonologically and syntactically.
These are all pretty much details, to be worried about -- if at all -- after you have come to some degree of proficiency with basics, like getting atomic structures right and moving pieces around with ease.
From: Lormoral King <ucauricuhum@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, October 2, 2013 8:15 AM
Subject: [lojban] A new member has some questions
Hello everyone,
this is my first mail to this list. I recently found out about Lojban and have been spending a lot of time reading about it. When learning languages, I prefer to first get a very broad overview before focusing on the details. Once I am more familiar with the big picture I can better tell where all the little things I learn go in the grand scheme of things. So, I have been reading as much as I could fine online; mostly tiki pages and some old mailing list conversations, but I also saw some comments on the facebook group that interested me. I understand the language is currently in a flux, though I cannot quite tell what the officials' stance on anything is. I have seen talk of certain proposed changes, and I'd be interested to know what I should think of them and also what their status is, specifically the 'dotside' reform, the thing about connectives getting reduced (I hope you know
what I mean), and what I think was called 'cmevla as a class of brivla' (I wasn't really able to follow the discussions). Also, I saw some people using different accent marks sometimes, Does this mean I can capitalize words, since capital letters were previously used for stress marking purposes?
I hope I didn't ask too many questions!
mi'e Ucauricu'um (I hope I said that right)
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