Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: a new kind of fundamentalism

From: "Lionel Vidal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 21:11:56 +0200

Robert LeChevalier:
> While the Board is debating the question right now, my (abbreviated)
> opinion is that the grammar, as defined in CLL has long been considered
> complete.

You said earlier that most lojbanist tend to be perfectionists who do not
like to ever be incorrect. IMO the grammar is not complete enough
to allow that yet. As many discussions and recognised bad or incorrect
usages show, semantic ambiguity, especially in the chapter on logic,
but also in some other area (quantifiers, tense...) still prevents a truly
non ambiguous usage: what you say today is likely to remain
grammatically correct tomorrow, but the intended meaning may
become quite incorrect when some issues are solved.

> I understand that Esperanto has multiple ideologies on certain aspects of
the
> language, but that while they are apparently significant for the people
who
> argue them enough that they bother to do so, the different ideologies are
> largely "inconsequential" to the learner.

Indeed. That was the very point I tried to express in my previous post.
Jboske tinkering or specific usage has no negative impact on new
learners. On the contrary this tinkering may help him to better understand
some difficult points of the language, even (or mainly) while disagreeing
with the proposed changes.
And for those not interested in tinkering, it's simple enough to ignore
the thread. But I agree that, to avoid what And calls "a tiresomely
perennial source of conflict and occasional acrimony", we should
discipline ourselves and use the appropriate list (something I admit
to never have done).

> Nick has suggested to me that there will likely come to exist multiple
> dialects of Lojban, with a colloquial one and an academic one the obvious
> ones that are forming. The (at least) two dialects as they are developing
> share the same grammar, and the same lexicon (with some experimental
> cmavo), and the meanings of the words are compatible enough that
> communication between speakers of the two dialects occurs (and indeed many
> speakers use different dialects at different times); we can live with
this.

This is a de-facto situation in multi-national esperanto meetings: because
of cultural differences and/or native languages inprint, usage may greatly
differ but communication is always possible, and if not, simple explanations
usually suffice to enlight participants. And again, this is not a default,
but a desirable feature, as it is paradoxally always a source of better
long-term understanding.

> In the absence of the Elephant, I think that the jboske debates are best
> conducted by creating a pseudo-elephant using the wiki.

I may have missed something. Could someone explain what is this Elephant?
A kind of DB for memos?

-- Lionel