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

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 14:35:52 -0400 (EDT)

On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, Nick Nicholas wrote:

> 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.

If I read you correctly, you say the Sapir-Whorf application of Lojban
will meet with more success than the Logical one? I think the Logical side
could be shored up or reinforced, not by precisely tuning the meaning of
gismu and cmavo but by creating a set of tools that permit a level of
comprehensible pedantry as yet unknown in any natural language. This is
actually something I have been secretly working on.

> 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.

Only the Wiki accurately reflects the confusing, interrelated,
associative, messy body of work that is the Current Understanding About
Lojban.

The Wiki has become essential for anybody that wants to know all the
goings on. But this list carries plenty of content as well.

I think it is an important milestone when the amount of activity becomes
greater than any single person to follow. In 2001 we have reached it.

-----
A Nationalist is a Globalist who's city has been bombed.