Just because nobody want to do it, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done. Similarly, just because somebody(/ies) want to change things based on usage doesn't mean that they (or somebody) doesn't need to write up explicit and detailed reports of what these usages are. Lojban is the most thoroughly described human language because it has to keep a check on its monoparsing. All usage has be be integrated into the grammar that makes that possible. Right now the problem is (purportedly) that we don't know enough about some old things (though the monoparsing claim continues) nor anything at all about some new things. As for the claim about the old things, I have been trying to find out what is lacking but cannot find a clear statement in the morass of items
under BPFK., cmavo, and related topics starting from the homepage. I am sure all the material there somewhere but, after a dozen years any organized list has been lost or dissipated. It is not even clear whether the problem is that there are cmavo that have no definition (a likelihood, since at one time there seemed to be a new cmavo every week, most of which then disappeared without a trace -- a good fate for cmavo generally, by the way), in which case it is not clear in what sense they exist at all, or, more likely, there are camavo whose definitions are somehow (how?) incomplete (again raising the question in what sense they actually exist. Toki pona listed a word for several years and people speculated what it meant until finally it was defined and turned out to be nothing needed or wanted in the language). So, maybe if the list of needed fixes from the old language were collected again (or resurrected -- it may
actually be there somewhere) and the irc group (and other innovators, of course) came up with a list of their usages (which may, of course, turn out not to be new at all, given the state of lack of information about what is real), we can agree to finish off a description of the language (possibly contradictory for the nonce) and sort back a satisfactory description ("satisfactory" being the operant weasel here).
On Sunday, September 14, 2014 2:47 PM, Dustin Lacewell <dlacewell@gmail.com> wrote:
"The selpa'i group..."
For what its worth, I don't really 'represent' 'selpahi's group' anymore. I don't even know why this thread has continued so long. I just couldn't stand having our community referred to as language destroying tinkerer's any longer.
No one even wants to do the original thing anymore since no one who was offering to participate in what was originally proposed could possibly desire to be seen as destroying the language, but that's what they were made out to be. We never intended for a coup, because a coup implies there is an existing structure in place. We were simply trying fill what is actually a huge glaring lack of one. But I guess the decayed ephemeral existence of one is enough for this language.