[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
On 9/9/2014 4:50 PM, And Rosta wrote:
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.
If incompleteness is what it is, then I can likely be convinced. But I
believe that the discussion was about change/evolution.
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.
It has been the bugaboo of pretty near every conlang project in history
- the inability of the developers to stop tweaking it just a little
more. Thus it is not a matter of "still that many". I'd have to be
convinced that there is something distinctive about Lojban as to exclude
it from the norm for conlangs in history.
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.
That is still my default. I don't know why it is not baseline-compliant
(indeed, Xorxes has told me that the old usage is not incorrect under
xorlo)
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?
Maybe a lot of people aren't too worried about being "logically
ambiguous" as you call it.
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,
Most certainly yes.
of course, because changes haven't been imposed from on-high.
Not since 1997 (except for xorlo).
So all the folk leaving for the last 27 years
have been leaving for other reasons; disgruntlement at the unfinished
design
Unfinished documentation is the larger criticism. We still need a real
dictionary. And probably several published books in-language, to show
that people have invested the time in the language to produce such books
knowing that they won't be obsolete with the next ad-hoc change proposal.
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.
I haven't seen evidence of politics being a significant factor. Most
people are undoubtedly oblivious to the politics.
The largest reason is still lack of time, coupled with a sense from
discussion and product that we are done fiddling.
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.
Maybe, in a sense. But I doubt that it will seem that way so long as
the prescription doesn't change.
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.
I am before weary. %^) I don't even own a cell phone, much less
something with a data plan (for one thing I have trouble reading the
tiny buttons and screens, and would need a stylus because my fingers are
too large for the keys - dialing a simple telephone number is a
challenge for me). "apps" are alien to me. And I hate web-based
software in general. I avoid downloading software on my pc for fear of
malware. So learning new technology is something I rarely deal with.
lojbab
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.