Subject: improvement (was: RE: Loglan

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 11:04:46 -0000

Lojbab:
> There are thus a relatively enormous (compared to either of the 
> two "active" communities) number of what Steven Belknap called "sleeper 
> cells" or rather "sleeper individuals" out there many of whom are waiting 
> for what JCB never delivered, and we are close to delivering: a "completed" 
> language that they can learn without fear of the powers that be changing it 
> yet again for purposes of "improvement" (a symptom that has killed so many 
> artificial languages and their communities in the last hundred years that 
> you would think that we'd learn something by now) 

Some Lojbanists are interested in the whorfian experiment, so don't
care about improvement. Other people are attracted to Lojban precisely
because we are reaping the benefits of earlier improvement. For those
people I guess there is a trade-off between improvement and the hassle
of relearning. Each individual will judge the trade-off differently,
partly depending, I imagine, on how much they've learnt already. But
we should not speak of improvement with contempt, since had there
never been any, most of us would not be here now.

--And.