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Re: [lojban] Why Lojban fails





Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 16:55:01 UTC+3, clifford escreveu:
Oh, my!  I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.  I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.  

Yeah I just reminded everyone who would be confused otherwise. "Lojban is done, no longer usable" this kind of thoughts you know.
 
My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”

Well I wonder who is working in the direction of monoparsing at all? These numerous AI startups?
 

As for why learn Lojban. I guess as usual: dreams of a better spoken language, spoken code, unambiguous language. In some sense Lojban is close to that. It has live support (newcomers get answers from humans), rich history and is (I hope still) not under any JCB-like dictatorship (Everlasting changes to the language).
 In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal.  But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder.  Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable. But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.  
If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents.  

No. Many more.  

Thehe winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret.  Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!).  Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there.

Hm, where?
 
What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join?  Nothing, really.  So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).

Remember Loglan1 book that was creatively rewritten I to the CLL.
 More John Cowans can appear in future.

I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least).  And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar.  After all, I am in the middle of it.  

Idk, in Facebook tokipona group there is some dude called Clifford that every now and then posts philosophical discussions that are hard to grasp.
 

On Sunday, April 12, 2020, 06:02:08 AM CDT, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote:




Em domingo, 12 de abril de 2020 12:30:07 UTC+3, uakci escreveu:
(snip)
Lojban even if failed elsewhere shines here in it's stability.

Latin, too, is a stable language. But it's been long abandoned, for Romance languages had sprung about. The only reason some people learn Latin is for academic purposes, since it has a great share in the body of scientific works our world has produced.

Latin is a live language  btw.
As the CLL puts it creation of new words is encouraged.

(see (1))

I feel no bloat in it at all but backward incompatibility as a drawback. 

Languages change regardless of backward compatibility. No solution is truly future-proof; the only approach that guarantees success is to embrace change. Dismissing change on grounds of there being change in the first place is, in my opinion, hilariously wrong — then if you're so passionate about keeping the language in its current form, why not declare it to be a success and, most importantly, move on to more important things in our lives?
I don't consider any notion of "success" for Lojban as being important. No teleology sorry.

Then why are you engaging in a discussion about Lojban failing? If it doesn’t matter to you, then you might as well stop caring and, as I’ve suggested before, move on.

I initially replied to pycyn. That whatever the goals were they are not important.
So I'm engaging in it just to say that the topic is of little importance. 

> > Isn't that… like… the opposite of what I want and the exact statement of what you want?
Sure. You are trying to change and change and change the language so that new learners will never catch up 

(ad (1))

I see this as the manifestation of the ultimate hypocrisy. We are encouraged to create vocabulary, and vocabulary is a core part of the language, but no grammar proposals for you! I don’t understand why you don’t have this visceral reaction of disgust when people add ‘new and foreign’ zi’evla like {inde}, {mlauca}, {kaipti}, {uinmo} — yet, they too are something a learner will have to catch up with.

That's stability. Lojban is declared that way. New words are encouraged. See the CLL. New learners will know that if they read the CLL. They will be ready for it.

Whatever you/I/other fluent or non fluent speakers decide to change in the CLL will only lead to the community dying out.

I can see one important exception to it: mistypes in English text. I haven't witnessed any antagonism in fixing them.

As for fixing internal contradictions or adding new parts of the language as being official (sublanguages, dictionary, translations) that in fact leads only to the feeling of "I will never make this". If Lojban were some programming framework supported by some la mikro softo company we could ignore that and say: learn this ever-changing thing or leave it.
 
However, any attempts to introduce changes to the language which simplify it and remedy all the overengineering are always turned down by the ‘official’ language ‘lobby’. This causes the language to drift away from what people actually use — slowly but surely — and I really am sure that this will turn against you.

What I think is of little importance too.
I may speak xorlo or another crazy dialect. Thats my choice. New learners have none. They must first reach fluency.
If existing fluent speakers don't stop tinkering seriously soon there will be fewer and fewer new learners coming (some assert this is already happening).



Here, let me try and make a point. Ever come upon The Glasgow Conversation of 1995? One of the conversants happens to use a certain word that the other isn’t familiar with, and so the conversation devolves into a mini-argument about those ‘bloody new cmavo’. (I don’t suspect that they were totally serious with it, but that’s how it went in the end.) This is a pinnacle of Lojban ‘cancel culture’, and do you know what cmavo was the offender here? It’s {bu’u}. Now would you imagine that a cmavo that’s used all the time nowadays had people against it when it was being first introduced?

That was before Lojban got into "release" state. But even from the CLL 1.0 standpoint addition of some "su'oi" cmavo is okay, the CLL allows for that. I would mildly argue that such additions make learning harder. I wouldn't recommend adding such new words into tutorials.

However, e.g. every 5 years some official organization could say " here is the new version of the language, instead of print "hello" you should now say print("hello") ". This would obviously make the community lose  those who bought the previous edition of the Book but at the same time give some sense of bettering over time. But given that no such committee is going to appear anytime soon (lack of technical and organisational skills) this is just my fantasy that can be safely ignored. Better to stick to the only edition of the language.

Pretend English is our language of interest. Every time somebody says ‘there’s reasons’ instead of ‘there are reasons’, as a fellow English speaker you MUST lash out at them and tell them they belong to the deepest strata of hell. In other words, if you have opinions about what the language should be like, you MUST make it clear that those are the correct ones. Good luck making friends with this sort of attitude.

English is not prescriptive.
 

Also, Dotside.

All this is proof that over the entire history of language, people have bitched, bitch, and will be bitching about how we ought to speak language X (where X may be English or Lojban). But you pretend that there’s no change and no change is needed and one can get by without any change at all. The only future I foresee for you and the people who share your mindset is that you’ll stay where you are with your Lojban v1.0 Final Release while others move on. I’ve already moved on, and so have the most prominent Lojbanists of the last decade. I’m pretty sure most of them still think of themselves as Lojbanists; however, the toxic attitude that’s so prominent among the members of the community ultimately makes them want to quit engaging in it, at least within the official venues like the IRC channel. 

That's fine. They can leave. Maybe Lojban has some inner hidden goal and Lojban taught them something so that they don't need either the language or the community anymore.
And that's great since without tinkering more space will be provided for new learners to come.
 

I don’t know if I have much more to say. But most importantly, y’all’s utter inability to ‘read the room’ and understand the needs of those who’ve had the largest impact on the community will eventually make it run dry.

You put it right. I don't care of those who already learnt Lojban.

I already had been pretty lifeless until recently, and that phase, I think, had managed to last for a couple years. ‘Impressive’, huh? I see that it must be either dead air or vain debates (or rather: debacles) about what Lojban should and shouldn’t be. 

Instead of just using it, as one does.

— Mi Hoashi jí ka.

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