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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 20:15:11 +0100

John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
> 
> > > Lojban may eventually start to evolve in the way natlangs do, but that 
> > > can only occur in a genuine way when there is a large body of 
> > > quasi-native speakers, and this cannot happen if people start tinkering 
> > > with the language. 
> > 
> > Are there any current examples of actual tinkerings that present
> > an actual impediment to the emergence of a large body of quasi-
> > native speakers?
> 
> It is the fact of tinkering, rather than any specific example thereof,
> that constitutes a disincentive to learning; without learning, there
> can be no such large body of speakers. People do not want to learn
> things that will become massively obsolete soon.

To complete the chain of reasoning, add "People believe that the fact of 
tinkering will make it probable to an unacceptably high degree that things 
will become massively obsolete soon, and that the absence of tinkering will 
make it probable to an acceptably high degree that things will not become 
massively obsolete soon".

That the point Lojbab usually makes, but I'm not sure if that's what 
Robin meant.

> > Technically, the BNF 'grammar' is more like a grammaticality-checker
> > than a true grammar. That is, it will tell you whether or not a
> > string is well-formed Lojban, but it won't tell you what it means.
> 
> Well, this is an equivoque on "grammar". Computer types use the word
> "grammar" in precisely this sense.

Yes, I know that. By "technically" I meant, "in the context of its
application to a language"; ordinarily if you are describing a language
and talk about the 'grammar', you would be expected to mean what 'grammar'
usually means when used to describe language. For historical reasons,
Lojban uses 'grammar' in the computer rather than linguistic sense:
hence my "technically". It's not a cheap quibble, because the BNF is
sometimes viewed as though it were more substantive than a grammaticality
checker.

--And.