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On Mon, 23 Dec 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > And if you lose that vote of Confirmation --- as I believe you will > > --- you may choose to withdraw. For the good of the language, I urge > > you, as strongly as possible, not to. A kludge with some sprinkling of > > Excellentness is still better than the status quo. Without formalists, > > we will indeed be left with doodoo > > I'm in two minds on this one. If I work to improve Lojban Mark I, I > might in effect to reduce the chances of there being a demand for Lojban > Mark II. I think that the sooner the Loglan project moves on to Lojban > Mark II, the better for the project, so in that sense kludgey fixes are > perhaps detrimental: it's a bit like Microsoft Products -- because > Microsoft kludges them up so they're just about good enough, there isn't > the demand for anything better, so we all end up with the barely > adequate. Do I really want to help to bring about Microsoft Lojban? I can't speak for the community, especially when there was so little public debate about the BF, but it could be that the BF exists because some of the leading figures perceived that Lojban was broken enough to need some fixing. I didn't used to think so, and was at odds with Nick about it, but have since become pessimistic, after seeing that in enough cases, the emperor is naked: if the CLL could be defended by people with clear ideas, in Lojban, I could sign on, because there would be a solid and dignified agenda to sign on TO, even if it wasn't perfect or pretty in my opinion. But in many cases, there isn't. People want to be fundamentalists, but they can't decide what it is they want to be fundamentalists to! We are too intelligent as individuals to swallow a Bible that contains contradictions; in any case that requires a priesthood whose wisdom is rarely challenged. Therefore I am forced to advocate a Lojban Mark 2 (according to the resisters), which is indistinguishable from a new dialect of Lojban, which is indistinguishable from Standard CLL Lojban with a little bit of usage drift (according to its users), which, in this case, is the Academic Lojban that Nick has been murmuring about for years. I don't care to get into glass half empty/full arguments about how much "change" constitutes a radically new language, and how little is simply Book Lojban with a tiny bit of expected drift. We should not break the baseline in terms of rearranging gismu places; however, users are free to delete (ignore) cmavo, to exploit experimental cmavo, and to drift the meaning of existing words here and there in accordance as they see fit. > > I hate this, because I think the status quo CLL gadri are > > muddle-headed bozosities, and the Excellent Solution is pristine and > > shiny. Please remind me what the Excellent Solution is, or paste me a link to it? I like things that are excellent. -- // if (!terrorist) // ignore (); // else collect_data ();