Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update

["'Wuzzy' via lojban" <lojban@googlegroups.com>]

I think the proposal is very bad and looks pretty half-baked to me.
I am strongly against it.

Any changes, even small ones, to the place structure of gismu
definitions are likely to have huge impact to the language.

The gismu are very important words in Lojban. The place structure of a
gismu affects the place structure of loads and loads of new ones, and
roughly determines the meaning of stage-3 fu'ivla.

If you change even just one (!) gismu definition, you have to deal with
these problems:
- Ambiguity. People may wonder “Hmmm? Did person X mean ‘broda’ in the
sense BEFORE or AFTER the gismu rewrite?”.
- Even if people knew that, lojbanists basically may be split into two
camps, the “before gismu rewrite” and the “after gismu rewrite” camp.
- The existing regular lujvo using this gismu may become irregular. A
person may wonder “Huh? Where did that X place come from?”. The lujvo
would still work, but remembering will be harder.
- This will likely invalidate many texts from before the change, since
gismu are used so often in the language.

I am not saying these problems are neccessarily unsolvable. But the
proposal does not seem to address any of these problems. Also, you do
not even mention how the existing lujvo should be treated. I could
think of three strategies: Just keep all the lujvo we have already and
accepting that some of the nice regular lujvo are not regular anymore
(and get a place from nowhere, for example.). Or rewrite all existing
lujvo as well, which I guess would take a LONG time. Have fun doing
that ;-). Or just throw away all lujvo and start from scratch. But this
would likely frustrate a lot of jbovlaste editors.
None of these strategies make me particulary happy and I can not think
of a better one. It would be nice if you at least have *some* strategy.
You just want to push your proposal without even considering the
consequences in the long run.

I acknowledge that there are indeed some gismu definitions which could
have been better. Some gismu definitions are clearly suboptimal. But as
far I can tell, I never had a problem with _using_ gismu. I learned the
gismu, and I can use all of them. The gismu are not so badly broken
that they are unusable. I MAY be in favor of changes to gismu which are
unusable anyways, but then you better show me the exact gismu are
ACTUALLY unusable (NOT just inconvenient). Although I also dislike
_some_ gismu definitions like that of “latna” I think this alone does
not justify to rewrite the definition. The problems which can arise from
rewriting even just one gismu clearly outweigh my personal distaste for
the definition of “latna” (for example). Besides, I fixed the problem of
“latna” in another way: I invented the word “atna” which is the same as
“latna” but without the cultural implications (x3 and x4 removed). You
find the definition on jbovlaste. I think this is a nice and cheap
workaround for gismu definitons you don’t like: Simply create a new
word instead.

Conclusion: It is true that there are some gismu definitions which are
suboptimal. But they are far from being broken and unusable. Because
you think the gismu definitions are sub-optimal, you propose to change
the gismu. I think the impact of this change is too large and the
possible results are scary to me.

It would be nice if we just could change the gismu “for free”. But
actually, the price of changing just one gismu is rather high. And you
want to change ALL gismu if I understood correctly. The impacts on the
existing lujvo on jbovlaste would be extreme. 
So this proposal is a no-go for me. Unless you want to fork the
language, but you don’t want to do that either. 

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