Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Loglan

From: Steven Belknap <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2002 08:25:49 -0600

On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 07:07 AM, And Rosta wrote:

> Steven:
>> On Sunday, December 1, 2002, at 05:14 PM, Invent Yourself wrote:
>>
>>> For heaven's sake! If someone is new to this whole mess, and after
>>> reading
>>> that hoary article they search and discover that there are two 
>>> existing
>>> dialects now forty years on, and that one is alive and the other is
>>> dying,
>>> the furthest thing from their minds will be looking for a cmavo to
>>> toggle
>>> between them!! They will look for the best dialect, and learn it! If
>>> they
>>> mistakenly select Loglan, so be it
>>
>> More likely, they will conclude that we are fractured community of
>> warring, clueless Bozos and avoid both lojban and Loglan
>
> I just tried googling for Lojban and for Loglan. 384000 hits for 
> Lojban.
> 6750 hits for Loglan. (Volupuk, 29500; Esperanto, 1,080,000; Novial,
> 2000; "Klingon" 398000, Tlingan, 46; Quenya, 35,200; Laadan 3300.)
> So someone doing a bit of sustained investigation would soon realize
> that Lojban is 57 times more active than Loglan... Note that Esperanto
> has only 3 times more hits than Lojban.
>
> But I do think that it is important to work on reunifying the
> language. Given that the old version seems to be dead, in practise
> reunification means pointing out that Lojban is the living version
> of Loglan, and this could be pointed out a little more prominently
> in our official web presence. I don't see it as disrespectful to
> TLI Loglan: we're not dissing the language, we'd just be pointing
> out that it is moribund, and helpfully pointing out to newbies
> who have heard of Loglan that the living community of Loglanists
> is to be found in Lojbanistan.
>
> --And.
>

We agree. Loglan is dead, long live lojban. Now if the conquering 
heroes could stop their cock-walk strutting about, maybe we can build 
the community to the point where we beat Esperanto in a googlecount. 
Building a community is facilitated by making newbies feel welcome, 
even if they are Loglan oldbies. Perhaps the controversy can be summed 
up as follows: I believe there are about 500 old Loglanders who might 
be interested in learning lojban. xod believes I am wrong. This seems 
like a testable hypothesis to me: track 'em down and ask 'em.

-Steven