Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership

Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG, On 09/09/2014 18:30:

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.

It seems to me you're setting up a largely false dichotomy. Most of what remains to be done is to complete the design where it is incomplete. So the choice is whether to do that explicitly or leave it to usage. Not much relearning entailed by that. There is the additional choice of whether to make simplifications that require a handful of individuals to do some relearning now, for the benefit of making the task for all future learners much simpler, but that is a separate debate.

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.

Are there still many that feel thus? I wonder if it's a myth that gets perpetuated because you propagate it so insistently.

In old usage, "le" was standardly not used in a baseline-compliant way; cf how "le nu", "le ka", "le du'u" used to be default in usage. In old and new usage (for new usage, I'm relying on Selpa'i's observation), logical scope of syntactic clausemates is generally ambiguous. How many people are going to want to preserve old ways that aren't baseline-compliant or are rampantly logically ambiguous?

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.

Not in the history of Lojban proper, of course, because changes haven't been imposed from on-high. So all the folk leaving for the last 27 years have been leaving for other reasons; disgruntlement at the unfinished design and the political sclerosis that prevents its completion must be the major reason why people leave Lojban, out of all reasons that have to do with some sort of disaffection with Lojban.

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.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify these dozens if not hundreds of conlangs whose usage would have spread if people had stopped fiddling with the language design.

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".

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.

Especially in the case of a language like Lojban, one expects that there will always be a strong strand of prescriptivism, in areas where usage deviates from the official design or from logic. Prescriptivism is a form of engineering. It has a bad name in the domain of natlangs, mostly because actual prescriptivists tend to be foolish, but to people attracted to Lojban by its explicit definition and ostensible logical basis, rational prescriptivism is likely to be welcome.

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).

It was discussed back in the 90s, but is it in CLL? I can't find a way to search CLL online (-- there must be one, but googling doesn't bring it up). It's not in CLL Ch 13 where po'o is introduced.

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.

I went to the humungous effort of looking kibro and di'ai up in jbovlaste. To find jbovlaste, one googles "jbovlaste". Or, even quicker, google "jbovlaste kibro" and you get the answer in one step. For users of handheld devices, Gleki has made an android jbovlaste app -- it's excellent! And it's dead easy to use even for those of us who are weary at having to learn new technology.

--And.

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