[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] the future of Lojban's leadership
On 9/11/2014 11:48 AM, TR NS wrote:
On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 7:20:54 PM UTC-4, Dustin Lacewell wrote:
TR NS,
This is the unifying reason the FAR MAJORITY of conlangs die! Accept
this at face value!
I'd be concerned that a language that did not achieve its stated goals
might also suffer the same fate. Regardless I will take it at face
value, and conclude Lojban has reached a type of impasse, perhaps
inevitable.
Clearly there are two camps of thought: There are those, like yourself,
who wish to see the language frozen, unassailable from all but minor
adjustments, wanting to get on with *using* the language,
That has been the commitment from the start.
and see the language's death in any further modification.
Not necessarily death. But certainly prescriptive changes by fiat will
tend to drive away people, especially if it creates the sense that the
language community is being incessantly driven by "language tinkerers"
Then there are those who
see a language that has not yet reached it's fruition --still in need of
work, minor or significant, and in seeing those "holes", see a dead
language in one that is no longer evolving.
The language will certainly evolve regardless. But if the evolution
occurs because of how people use the language, it won't kill the
language. This is one way in which xorxes has been very smart. He USED
the language in the way that he wished when translating Alice in
Wonderland, and people read it and learned from his model, which was not
so strongly different from the standard language as to be unreadable.
There is no reconciliation of these two views. The only solution is a fork.
In history, such forks have generally meant that one or both branches
fail. Esperanto is perhaps unique in having survived many attempts to
change it which became splinter languages. But Zamenhof's original work
is still essentially valid and readable, even though (so I am told by
skilled Esperantists) the usage of modern Esperantists is considerably
different from Zamenhof's.
Lojban was the dominant survivor of the split with TLI Loglan. There
are still a few people who try to use the other language, and their
community has been more tolerant of endless tweaking than ours is. But
I don't think that their community is growing much, whereas I am pretty
sure that Lojban is growing out of any possible control by LLG, even
without a finalized CLL. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this debate
more than a decade and a half after 1st edition CLL (and CLL sells many
more copies in a year now than it did a decade ago, which is why we are
running out).
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.