Subject: [lojban] Re: Usage deciding (was: RE: Re: [Announcement] The Alice Translation Has Moved And Changed

From: Jordan DeLong <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 11:11:00 -0500

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:18:34PM +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
> la lojbab cusku di'e
> >I have long been afraid that Jorge's using an innovation might become
> >accepted as a viable standard merely because he has used it a lot.
> 
> Do you have a concrete example that causes you such concern? Why
> would it be a problem that something I use becomes accepted? Are
> you similarly afraid of innovations by other users of the language?

I think his worry is due to the large amount of (mostly ;P) lojban
text comes from you (.io.i'e). But there are plenty of "innovations"
which are only used by one person each; none of them (yours included)
have serious risk of being adopted as a part of the language,
thankfully. See below about usage.

> > "Let
> >usage decide" was meant to refer to collective usage by many people in many
> >contexts, so that the usage itself becomes normative rather than
> >exceptional.
> 
> {ka'enai} would seem to be the best example of that, not only
> against CLL but also against the baselined grammar, and yet used
> by many people in many contexts.

ka'enai is not an example of that. There are not enough speakers
of lojban for usage to decide *anything*. Changing CAhA to allow
NAI deliberately is (a few) *people* deciding, not usage deciding.
So CAhA+NAI remains bad grammar (what's so bad about saying "na'eka'e"
anyway) for now (I suppose after the baseline CAhA+NAI may be
adopted).

In my view it is impossible for any single lojbanist to produce
enough text that their usage of any language feature would be
"decidedly" correct. The idea of usage deciding requires natural
language evolution, which is not possible for lojban yet since we
have so few speakers, and no speakers at the needed skill level.
So Lojbab needn't worry that your changes to the language will be
adopted (that is, unless you start writing learning materials ;P)

> >Jorge is free to advocate his ideas through usage, but has to
> >be prepared for people noticing and objecting.
> 
> I do my best to be prepared. Some people tend to object more
> than to notice, though. Many objections arise only after I bring
> the issue up myself in discussions.

This is likely because for most lojbanists (myself included), sitting
down and reading more than a page or so of text is still quite
difficult (which is the whole reason that usage is not *yet* able
to decide anything). But don't worry, I'll do my best to complain
if I see you deliberately abusing something, though ;) (barring
obvious standing complaints on lack of dots, and that weird ---
stuff for dialogue).

mu'o
-- 
Jordan DeLong - [email-masked]
lu zo'o loi censa bakni cu terzba le zaltapla poi xagrai li'u
sei la mark. tuen. cusku