On Monday, September 15, 2014 12:32:38 PM UTC-4, And Rosta wrote:
Would this be an initiative to complete the Lojban design, much as Lojban itself was an initiative to bring Loglan into a stable and public domain form? Or would it be an initiative to create the best possible loglang? These would be completely different initiatives but to each initiative some bits of your message seem to pertain.
Something in between. On the one hand we're not starting out with Lojban (or Loglan) as the mainline language, but instead creating a synthesis, while also reconsidering the choices made by these languages at each step in the process. Although it will likely differ in many respects, it is still very much an child of Loglan/Lojban, not an attempt to create an wholly new logical language.
If it's an initiative to complete the Lojban design, probably what's required is someone to document the completions that xorxes and selpa'i would recommend -- maybe an informal document for others to check over the recommendations, and then, if one were wanted, a formal CLL-like document. It seems a shame to declare a fork, and rename the language, before forking and renaming has been shown to really be necessary.
I don't see how a fork can be avoided. I think it's become very clear that Lojban, pretty much as it is presently documented, is how the language is going to stay. The persons in charge give some service to change by "usage" and potential consideration of proposals after full documentation of the current language is complete. But how many decades are we to wait for that to happen? And can it actually ever be complete? And doesn't the whole notion of "completion" work against the notion of change?
Documenting the completions that xorxes and selpa'i would recommend is a good idea, but it's clear to me it would not change much here. I'd like to see these proposals posted to the Logla issues board where they will be definitely have an effect.
Besides, starting a new project also allows us to take a step back and reconsider things that would simply not be possible otherwise.
If it's an initiative to create the best possible loglang, I suggest initiating discussion on the Engelang list (still on Yahoogroups). My views on loglangs, which would be better discussed on Engelang than here, are that an obstacle to progress is that nobody has discovered a good enough design, and the solution to this, if one exists at all, is to discuss the problems and slowly turn them over in our minds, as with any not very tractable problem; it's not a problem that can be solved just by people rolling up their sleeves and trying to get stuff done. But the design is modularizable, and some modules, such as the list of keyest predicates, could be worked on separately. Slightly better documentation of the state of the art, e.g. Xorban, would be nice, too.
It is a project to create a better human language that is very "loglang". But not a project to create a better "loglan" for the sake of logicians. I hope that makes sense. We will do are best to take as much as we can into consideration and go from there. But it's not a issue of letting the "perfect be then enemy of the good". We'll take the good.
I will bring it up on Engelang too. Thanks.