Re: [lojban] Revitalizing LLG: Suggestions for the 2014 annual meeting

2014-08-23 4:00 GMT+04:00 Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG <lojbab@lojban.org>:

On 8/22/2014 3:03 PM, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:

If we are talking about the LLG meetings in a mailing list then using
Lojban and only Lojban is a *must*.

Only if we wish the participation in meetings to drop even further (and as it is most members are silent after the initial indication of presence).

Is this a huge problem for anyone of using Lojban?

Probably. I'm not sure that I could do it, and actually be able to communicate.

There are enough speakers in IRC who can at least produce Lojban sentences if not in real time but at least with the help of a dictionary.

You response surprises me.

Non-Lojbanists might conclude that Lojban is not even a working language.

However, is it culturally neutral to continue using non-Lojban for that?

If yes then may be this person should go to
lojban-beginners or lojban mailing list first?

A lot of members may have left those lists because the discussions are more arcane than they would wish, and/or they don't know the language sufficiently well.

Remember that the qualifications for membership have always been an interest in and commitment to the organization, rather than to the language.

So I suggest using only Lojban for any official documents.

We aren't getting a set of meeting minutes in English. Do you think Robin will be able to more easily produce them in Lojban? And he is presumably as fluent a Lojbanist as we have.

I didn't know he couldn't. I thought only a lack of his time could prevent him from doing so.

But even then assign other people for that. E.g. I can do initial translation and you can check them afterwards (since not I will be signing them anyway).

We would have to start by having a translation of the Bylaws into Lojban (and agreeing on that translation). I would then suggest translating whichever book of parliamentary procedure that John Cowan specifies into Lojban. Otherwise we lack the terminology for a parliamentary meeting.

Terminology can be made on the flow during translations with adding them to jbovlaste.

I also suggest translating existing documents into a code with members
of the LLG (or at least by le jatna) signing them as official ones.

Not sure what this means. Code kia? Which existing documents? Any translation of the Bylaws that was going to supplant the current English ones would probably have to be approved as a Bylaw amendment in order to be treated as "official".

Your replies showed that the Bylaws can be superseded by other bylaws that weren't even published. This hampers the development of the existing and new projects.

If there was an official list of bylaws that are not superseded then we would be able to translate them to Lojban.

People would be able to rely on them knowing that those bylaws are not superseded.

If any bylaw can be ignored/superseded at any time and no one in the world (except members of the LLG) knows about them then

why do we have those bylaws?

Of course, given that CLL is one of the baseline documents, you may be calling for a translation of CLL into Lojban. That would be an interesting challenge, and a rather voluminous one. We'd need all-Lojban dictionary-quality gismu and cmavo lists too, and I never did accomplish the dictionary-quality cmavo list in English.

This project is

1. time-consuming

2. we don't have a working platform for doing CLL 1.1 even in English

My personal view is that linking to examples using numbers is a bad practice in CLL but since it is the official refgram and not a tutorial I can only suggest to myself reformatting and only then translating to Lojban.

Anyway CLL partially works as a good tutorial too (as others are criticized by many people coming to IRC channel). This means that translating CLL into Lojban itself is partially useless since many concepts and parts of grammar in Lojban explain themselves.

Official documents initially written in Lojban can be translated to
English later.

Which ones are those?

You decide. I imagine the full code including all documents that describe how LLG and BPFK works.

If anyone wants to change some laws then he/she must follow the existing procedures described in the code. New laws are added to the code so the code is always complete.

I'm not trying to say that the idea isn't laudable - in the (very) long term. But we aren't anywhere near that capability now, and the members would almost certainly reject such a proposal if forced to consider it. After all, they didn't think much of my including even one sentence in Lojban the last time I tried.

This all looks strange. It sound like all members say "Yeah, I support Lojban but I'm not going to learn it".

Why so?

Why not add people to LLG and BPFK that can produce correct Lojban sentences at least in written form?