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Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
On 9/7/2014 5:45 PM, Alex Burka wrote:
I haven’t lost faith in the endeavor, though I certainly can’t blame
Dustin for doing so. I do think it will take rather longer than we
perhaps thought when this thread began.
I still think that the software-development model is the way to go.
We already used a software development model. That is where the
"baseline" concept came from. The problem is that software needs to be
properly documented, and normally you don't go changing it without
documenting what you already have. The other problem is that the
"development" is supposed to already be done. Long done. And for a lot
of people, the idea that they might have to go to Microsoft Lojban 8.0
from 7.0 is enough to make them throw up their hands in disgust and turn
away from the language. They might accept small tweaks to fix bugs in
"Lojban XP", but they don't want to relearn anything.
Among other things, it lets wild experimentation coexist safely with the
carefully curated “master branch” — I mean, this is already happening in
the community, but it’s a mess and a hodgepodge of projects,
That is what experimental language is like, and should be like. Someone
else posted today on Buckminster Fuller's usages which are a form of
experimental English. For anyone who did not know about those usages,
they would be "a mess and a hodgepodge"
exactly
because there’s no accepted process, and it doesn’t help that people who
propose one tend to get shouted down.
Because we still haven't documented the baseline "languageware".
Languages change when they are actively used.
Not generally by fiat. Look how many approaches exist for English third
person pronouns which are gender-neutral. All are "changes" to English,
but none have really caught on.
For Lojban,
it’s a fact that threatens to conflict with some of its good features —
monosemy, syntactic unambiguity, parseability, etc. One “solution” to
this conundrum is to freeze the vocabulary and grammar, forever. I think
this will just result in everyone leaving (which seems to put me in
fundamental disagreement with those who think that if we change
anything, then everyone will leave).
This project is some 60 years old and we have a lot of history of people
explicitly leaving because of changes imposed from on-high. More
importantly, we have the history of dozens if not hundreds of conlangs
whose usage has not spread because people wouldn't stop fiddling with
the language design. Those that have survived and spread have stopped
being developed, and are simply USED. Adding computer terminology to
Esperanto as it becomes needed isn't a "language change".
Systematically changing the endings of gismu to fit some new schema is a
drastic change that would likely cause many to leave or schism.
People might have tolerated running across some new word on an IRC
channel and looking it up; we deal with learning new vocabulary all the
time in natural language. But they don't like someone telling them that
the old way to do something is wrong, and there is a new and better way.
But I also think there’s a middle
ground. We can allow some changes (with strict review, li’a sai),
without destroying the language.
At some point, you have to stop allowing changes EXCEPT by *natural*
language processes (which aren't so much "reviewed" as "documented after
the fact".
To one of Lojbab’s points (which are well taken, by the way, especially
the one about documentation of experimental grammar being hard to find):
in my mind, there is no way Lojban can be "considered DONE as an
engineering effort”.
Then we are fundamentally at odds. It MUST be "done" at some point.
Engineering must stop, and we move to usage.
Certainly the publication of the CLL and everything
leading up to that was an impressive achievement, and maybe it can be
considered “almost done”, but the mere existence of the BPFK and the ZG
are confirmation that the final word (whatever that means when applied
to a living language, see above) has not been said.
The intent of the BPFK was to finish the documentation of the language,
making corrections to CLL as necessary. The ZG acceptance of xorlo as a
major bug-fix because the community felt that the original design COULD
NOT be properly documented.
Moreover, it’s hard
to deny that changes have happened and become accepted by large portions
of the community since the publication of the CLL: the BPFK morphology.
xorlo was adopted into the ZG. Nearly everyone uses dotside for names.
"Dotside" is not really an engineering change, but rather using one rule
(the dot-pause, which is allowed between any two words) to allow another
rule to be ignored. Indeed it has been accepted because the listener
likely won't even notice that it is being used. And likely a dotside
user will not have a problem with the speech of a non-dotside speaker,
provided that the latter follows the pre-dotside rules.
xorlo was proposed and discussed within the BPFK as a solution to
problems in documenting the gadri. If the documentation had been
finished earlier, there would have been no need for the ZG. (Probably
true for dotside as well.)
Modern {ka} with {ce’u}.
should be documented as part of the baseline. ce'u predates said baseline.
The experimental gismu {kibro}
never heard of it.
and cmavo
{di’ai}. vu’o po’onai.
vu'o and po'onai should both be part of the baseline (not that I
remember what the latter means; I am sure it was discussed back in the
90s). I have no idea what di'ai is. That is the problem with
experimental usages. They aren't documented, and people like me would
have no idea what to do with the word if we run across it in text. Some
might try to figure it out like Jabberwocky (but the coinages in
Jabberwocky pretty much all correspond to brivla and not cmavo).
I am least interested in getting bogged down
in legalese and bylaws if such things turn out to obstruct the use of
Lojban and encourage it to stagnate (which is what’s arguably happened
in the last decade).
It hasn't prevented anyone from using the language as they see fit so
far. You won't hear me complaining because you use "di'ai". I just
won't understand you. If we're on IRC I can ask you what it means, but
if it is in text, I will have no clue.
The "stagnation" seems to me that people want to document and approve
new stuff without documenting the older stuff. I don't see any easy way
to resolve this impasse, but if there is, it would require someone to
write CLL sections covering new material to replace or add to the
existing text. If someone were doing this and collecting it somewhere,
AND the original baseline documentation was being finished, we could
deal with it. We do need a new edition of CLL, probably next year, and
the argument becomes what to put into it. Likely the decision will
effectively be made by those that do the writing.
That being said, yes, I’d like to join the LLG.
Noted.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. I feel strongly that progress is needed and
that there’s a way to get there, but I don’t claim to have all the
answers of course. I am glad that there will be a meeting soon, because
that’s at least potential progress.
There is a meeting every year. But there hasn't been progress every
year because most years, no one has any issues to bring up. The coming
meeting looks like it will resemble those of 2002-2003 when Robin and
others stepped in and took over. I stepped down as president, only
resuming the job when Matt resigned in 2010 (and I'll probably step down
again gladly if I get the feeling that someone is capable and willing to
fulfill the organizational responsibilities of the President. And some
day someone will have to take over the Virginia representative spot,
which exists solely for legal reasons).
lojbab
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