On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 10:28:39 PM UTC-3, lojbab wrote:
The problem is that "interesting problems" of the sort mentioned
indicate a lot of activity by a very few people, but the activity itself
drives other people away, especially when it a) look esoteric and B)
seems to imply incompleteness of design.
Perhaps too much is being made of the fact that pc and xorxes were the most expressive users in 2001: There were almost 6,000 messages in the mailing lists that year that were written by other people. In any case, the record-setting email volume in 2001 was followed by another record year in 2002, while LLG membership climbed to its highest historical level in 2003. This sustained growth seems at odds with the idea that the discussions were especially harmful to the community.
I've been meaning to return to the question of the (in)completeness of lojban's design since our exchange in the "Revitalizing LLG" thread last month.
The January 10, 1997 declaration of the baseline read, "THE LOGLAN/LOJBAN LANGUAGE DESIGN is considered COMPLETE". You offered the opinion that this is "still official policy". I have a couple of follow-up questions.
- How could the declaration of "completeness of design" have survived the adoption of the 2002 Baseline Statement? The text of the 2002 policy states that it "specifically supplants the official statement on the baseline", adding, "our statement, that the language design was 'complete', was … premature." It proposes a specific path to restoring "completeness", setting a goal of "having the LLG membership declare the language baseline to be complete at the annual meeting of the LLG in the summer of 2003. Upon that completion, the language design (baseline) will be frozen."
- Alternately, supposing that the 2002 Baseline Statement did have the force to supplant the 1997 declaration, and given that the 2003 Annual meeting made no declaration of completeness: When was a recognition of "completeness of design" restored to the language, and how was that process recorded?
Perhaps there is no way to reconcile "completeness of design" with the Baseline Statement and everything that has happened (and not happened) since. I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. "
Lojban: You're Doing It Wrong" seems to have envisioned a lojban where "completeness" is not a baseline assumption, but a guiding principle, however unattainable:
the job of the BPFK is to formalize Lojban in perfect detail, with the understanding that this is to occur in response to the language uses and its users, and thus will never actually be finished
mi'e la mukti mu'o