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Re: [lojban] Growth and decline in lojbanistan

On 9/18/2014 2:12 AM, mukti wrote:

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 <https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban/k7hIqBcTsXI/zge7y-72_HcJ>.

The January 10, 1997 declaration of the baseline
<http://www.lojban.org/tiki/1997+Baseline+Announcement> read, "THE
LOGLAN/LOJBAN LANGUAGE DESIGN is considered COMPLETE". You offered the
opinion that this is "still official policy".
I guess that I am wrong about this, because of the way the 2002 statement discussed the topic. 


 1. *How could the declaration of "completeness of design" have survived
    the adoption of the 2002 Baseline Statement?* The text of the 2002
    policy <http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Official+Baseline+Statement>
    states that it "specifically supplants the official statement on the
    baseline", adding, "our statement, that the language design was
    'complete', was … premature.
The latter was my statement, and referred to the cmavo list being unacceptably lacking in definitions (along with a lack of approved examples of lujvo and fu'ivla with place structures). These I have always considered documentation matters as distinguished from design, when I have spoken on the matter, but technically, the design isn't complete until the documentation is done, and the 2002 statement recognized that fact. But I continue to be somewhat sloppy in thinking that the stuff baselined in 1997 (CLL, gismu, cmavo, and rafsi) constituted a "complete" design. 

" 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."
It set forth certain tasks that we thought could be easily completed. Nick (and Robin after him) considered the cmavo documentation problem to be a much bigger job than we thought when I wrote the 2002 statement. 


 2. 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?*
It has not, because the BPFK never moved beyond step one of its tasking (in the 2002 statement), which said 


The primary task of the language design commission (banpla
fuzykamni) will be to complete brief definitions of the cmavo. The >target date 
for this effort shall be 15 May 2003, in order for >consideration by the
>members at the annual meeting of 2003; if that target date cannot be
>met, then the member ratification of the final baseline declaration >will be delayed until the following year. It is intended that this >effort shall take priority over work on other tasks charged to the >byfy. 

We are still trying to accomplish this.


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
<http://teddyb.org/robin/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban%3A+You%27re+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
I think Robin likewise was not looking at the original byfy charter, which had a much more limited set of assignments for the BPFK. When those 4 assignments are complete and approved as the new baseline by the voting membership, then the conditions of the 2002 statement will have been met.
The 4th assignment, by the way, includes the consideration of the various proposals such as xorlo which are changes 1997 design. Xorlo qualifies under point 5, as usage that has been established contrary to the existing documentation. dotside and perhaps a lot of the IRC proposals may also qualify, but we won't know until they are documented, which is why I have stressed that need for documentation in the form of change pages to CLL in recent comments. 

lojbab


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