To the initial question the answer is "Not at all", though with the proviso that whoever takes on the task shares the goal of producing a monoparsing grammar. I admit I am not convinced that this is among David's agenda, but then I am not convinced it really plays that much of a role in other people's agenda either. The process you propose is a normalization of the de facto process that Lojban has used for a couple decades just now being recognized and made effective. No objection to that, again with the proviso that the discussion keeps monoparsing ever in view and that changes that disrupt this feature are either automatically rejected or are farmed out for a thorough-going fix to bring them into the fold. If it does away with bureaucratic inertia, better yet. (Having been around this particular project for nearly forty years, I can reasonably predict ways that this will crash and burn, but that doesn't seem a reason to not do it, since the crashing and burning of another sort is already rather far advanced and this may slow that down at least for my lifetime.)On Sunday, September 14, 2014 4:51 PM, Dustin Lacewell <dlacewell@gmail.com> wrote:
John,No doubt you're able to point out this or that that needs to be done. I bet others can reference in their own words what they suppose is missing from some baseline or whatever. Great. How is the idea of moving all of that description into version control and giving selpahi the control of merging changes into that repository somehow in conflict with missing cmavo definitions?There are essentially two things this thread was originally about.1) Moving the process for maintaining the language from a mailing-list/wiki mixed with crudely (and often internally inconsistent) processes and by-laws enforced by elected participants who may or may not even still be interested in Lojban by the next time a meeting requiring their attention and expertise is called... to an open-source version controlled 'consider-the-change-on-the-merits-of-the-change' system where anyone can submit any change against the repository which can then be considered for what it is by the community at large (or more importantly individuals who are actually motivated to participate in that process). Everybody can contribute and changes can be openly, and safely merged or not merged in a very controlled and systematic manner.2) Reviewing the gimste for cohesiveness and regularity. We proposed to do this review using the process above. Where anyone can comment on any of the completely open and explicit individual proposed mutations to any particular word, make their own proposals and argue against those they disagree with.Neither of these things actually conflict with the needs in other areas, like finishing the cmavo definitions or any other arbitrarily prioritized agenda. All the arguments about relearning, CLL's, are arguments constructed to invoke fear of some fantasized destruction of the language. Neither of these proposed motions of actions reduce an existing description either. There is literally no substantiated argument against what we proposed (an open democratic process for explicit management of the language as data through version control and open-source policies for review and integration) other than 'waa, I don't actually like losing what sense of control I presume to have over the language'.
It amazing going back over the thread just how irrelevant and orthogonal the supposed rebuking of this motion turned out to be.
The current system for organizing and funneling the fluttering and whimsical productivity of Lojbanists for managing the language is bad. It assumes long-term commitment by a few select individuals to stay completely informed of a largish body of bylaws arbitrarily enforced between completely irregular periods of active governance and pure silence mixed with the demonstrable difficulty of actually being in-tune to how the language is changing in its utilization in various communities. It accumulates and forces processing of that work in larger batches instead of continuous review and integration consideration.Nothing about the proposed system violates anything about the needs to keep the language completely described and actually does a better job than the system that's being (quite terribly) defended in this thread.--On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 2:01 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote: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)."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.--
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