Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 17:07:05 -0700

cu'u la xod

>I don't know what Nick means when he says Lojban will never succeed.
>Although Nick is a supreme Lojbanist, some of his opinions, like his
>hatred of rafsi, are his alone.

*shrug* On rafsi, it's clear to me that its easy to confuse them, because
too there are too many rafsi around. Not the only that's said so, sorry:
http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?Desirability%20of%20rafsi

As you'll find, individuals can think individual parts of Lojban
misfeatures, without necessarily condemning the whole effort. There's a lot
of this, and that's why the baseline is so desperately guarded ---
different people, unfortunately, think different parts of Lojban
misfeatures.

As for the ultimate success of Lojban, this is part of a larger rhetorical
battle, which I will not do justice here. There are two conflicting goals
for Lojban: to remain logical, unambiguous, computer-parsable, etc., and to
be human-speakable, learnable, expressive, etc. I do think Lojban cannot
ultimately remain rigorous in all things. Pretty much everyone does. For
those interested in the logic side of Lojban, this will prove a failure ---
but an interesting failure, and the extent to which logic and rigour *can*
be maintained in Lojban is also interesting. For those not so interested,
the logical-minded are tilting at windmills anyway, and the effort to keep
Lojban logical is misguided as a result.

That's my take; you'll hear a separate take from xod, because we're
rhetorical adversaries on this. :-) (xod, if you think I'm caricaturing,
please feel free to step in.) You'll certainly hear a separate take from
Lojban Central (i.e. Lojbab, speaking ex cathedra), which is that Lojban is
to evolve naturally, with no impediment.

A major function of the wiki is in fact to document a lot of the underlying
claims, ideologies, and terminology. It may be involved to navigate, but it
is the best we have right now for a document of record. Any one person
writing this stuff down in a web page might do it more compactly, but it
will be a lot harder to let everyone be heard that way.

An added problem is that there's traffic to and from the Wiki and the List.
The elephant, for example, was discussed pretty much only on the Wiki.

Nick Nicholas, UCI, USA. [email-masked]
http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis
"Must I, then, be the only one to be beheaded now?" "Why, did you want
everybody to be beheaded for your consolation?" Epictetus, Discourses 1.1.