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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 15:24:59 +0100

xod:
> On Thu, 3 Oct 2002, Lionel Vidal wrote:
> > How can you decide who is and who is not a user of the language?
> 
> There are students who are using the language at a low level, and there
> are people who have publically stated their refusal to learn the language
> towards fluency. They decide themselves, not me!

AFAIK the only people who have baldly stated a refusal to learn are those
Lojbab tells us about, who say they refuse to learn an unstable language.
The closest thing to a public statement is me, who refuses to make a
*deliberate effort* to learn the language (or any other) towards fluency. 
In this regard I can, I believe, be bracketed with John; we both know
a lot about the language, though not through a deliberate effort to
learn, and fluency in itself is not a compelling goal.

I wouldn't object if someone refused to heed what I say about Lojban
on the grounds that I lack the requisite credentials, but I would
object if they did so as part of a debate with me on some point of
grammar or if they objected to my very participation in debates.

> > And then usage is only one of the criteria to judge the relevance
> > of a "prescription" (I would like proposal as a better word),
> > and in the case of lojban, except for a handle of people who can
> > claim a minimum fluency, the less important one. Education, culture,
> > general and linguistic knowledge, experience, etc. can produce
> > the most and practically useful improvements to the language.
> >
> > To give you an example on a connected subject, most linguists
> > specialised in some languages know them perfectly in their
> > intimate mechanism and discuss relevently of the specific
> > means used to convey meanings (which is kind of what jboske is
> > all about), but are not users. Most of them are not even fluent
> > in them.
> 
> I hear you. But the more contributions come from outside the using body,
> the more it is engineered, and the less it is evolving "naturally". Of
> course, when a language is barely in existence, and nobody yet uses it,
> only one of those options is possible. But we're long past that.

Even when a language is barely in existence, it can still evolve
naturally, in the manner of pidgins. I think it's fair to say that
the naturalists (see wiki) want Lojban to evolve as a pidgin, while
the hardliners want it to remain an engineered language. Even though
each group has a hard time sympathizing (or at least empathizing)
with the other, neither school is illegitimate.

BTW, I mean 'pidgin' as a technical term, not as a derogatory term
meaning "bad Lojban".

--And.