"
impose on the rest of us generally seems arbitrary"
Yes, because it is 'us' and then everyone else who you represent. Sure. Mmhmm.
"and in any case requires extra learning (and possibly unlearning, which is the real bugaboo)"
Which is the exact result that happens with changes borne through 'usage' as you say. But relearning or 'extra learning' is fine, as long as its not done by 'language tinkerers' which label you arbitrarily assign. Great. Makes perfect sense.
"We cannot prevent such dialectization, and I wouldn't want to try. But we also shouldn't allow one particular group/dialect dictate changes to everyone else, especially since the rest of us didn't experience whatever motivated your change."
You're just arbitrarily deciding that changes borne from a single community simply shouldn't be considered regardless of the nature of the change. Yeah this is so completely agreeable. I mean especially since we're dictating these changes on everyone else and this thread didn't start with a public announcement of intention and an invitation for the entire community to remark and participate. But I guess we didn't need the voice of the entire community because we have you.
"The original intent was that after the baseline"
Yeah great. By reiterating unfulfilled 'intention's' we can just avoid the entire issue completely, right? I mean -you're- not going to make good on those intentions are you? I didn't think so. So has your involvement in the project been reduced to just gridlocking the project with this tactic? I mean, why am I asking. Look at the pudding. Its made of proof.
"Your usage. Not that of others."
What others? Where is this mystical group of lojbanists that actually matter? Where are they either finishing your baseline, or prompting the community for progress like we are? They don't exist. You just keep referring to these mythical CLL holders as if owning a CLL somehow trumps other people in the community. I own a CLL. Who cares? It literally has nothing to do with what happens to the language after its release. As if, every non-fiction book I bought, I decided to lambast the related fields for progressing and outmoding my book. I could see you raising this point a year or few after the CLL was released but now this argument is insane.
"And I have to consider that any given change (as opposed to addition) potentially invalidates all the ever-growing corpus of text that is recorded before."
Usage exists to be eventually invalidated. Look at, gee, I don't know, the entire corpus of any language historically?
"That's nice. But your reality isn't everyone's."
You're responding to me describing our community. I wasn't extrapolating the work and daily utilization of lojban to any other community. I was describing our's. But this statement is just exemplary to expose just how disparaging you are to those you're not familiar with who's opinion's you disagree with. What is YOUR lojban reality Lojbab? Do you even have one? Is it more or less relevant to ours or literally any community using lojban today? But you can discount entire communities because you're the maladjusted leader. Get over yourself and stop acting like you have some relevancy that can dictate who's usage of Lojban is legitimate enough for the considerations of the usage to be useful in contemplating where the language goes.
"Just consider that someone who has been working on this project for 30-odd years just might know something that you haven't yet experienced. You are the one who offends me (and more importantly the rest of the community), by saying that my/our experience isn't valid while yours is."
Your'e replying to me admonishing you for being so distastefully shrugging off our community. This isn't a response to some objective statement about the language or grammar or some view requiring expertise. So because you're our president and and have existing experience with the language means that you can arrogantly and pompously disregard any part of the community you'd like and diminish others to justify your own position? Wow, that's a great argument. Let me be diminished because you have a history. What was I thinking?
"And your argument isn't especially new."
What exactly is our 'argument'? That we've been using the language for a long time consistently, translating works and teaching new comers and we have some retrospective on how to improve things and make things slightly easier or more natural? What the hell are you talking about? My position is basically this from the beginning: 1) "Hey guys, we have a substantial backlog of observed experiments in the language and since no one is leading the language, we propose this system for reviewing and making public a process for incremental mutation to the reference. 2) "Holy shit lojbab is an arrogant disconnected prick."
I wonder which argument here isn't new.
"That's very nice. But you still aren't the entirety of the language community, and you don't have the right to dictate to the rest of us (any more than I have the right to dictate to you)."
Again who does? Which part of the community has valid experience useful for contemplating and making considerations for what works and doesn't? Is it just you? Is it just your friends? Is there some other secret cove of language speakers that you can explicitly name that has this authority? Oh what about that non-sequitur about us 'dictating' changes to people? How about you not squlech an open movement to bring progress and activity back to the language where literally anyone can participate in those processes?
When the hell did we announce we were going to change the language without anyone else's considerations behind closed doors?
WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO SEES THIS OBVIOUS NON-SEQUITUR?
"I have no idea how legitimate your concerns are"
Of course you don't! Because instead of responding to the original prompt to the community to move things into a new active process for review and integration you simply waved your hands about pointing to plans you made years ago but never finished but you're going to stand here today, not even speaking a dialect of Lojban a nintadni would understand making up crap about how we're trying to dictate to everyone what should be instead of trying to go out of our way to establish an open and permissive collaborative system for managing the language.
You're insane and you're wrong. You're hurting the language more than anyone. Thank GOD the CLL wont be invalidated though!