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xod: > 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 note with happiness everything you say, and want to make two responses: 1. There's no point in having a baseline if people don't respect it in their usage. And in my view, there's little point in having usage if it doesn't respect a baseline. 2. The important thing at this stage is to agree that we are all engaged in the same enterprise and agree what that enterprise is. If we don't do this then we can't make progress. I see only two viable alternatives, which are entirely separate but not mutually exclusive. A. Ultra-fundamentalist. CLL is gospel except where it can conclusively be proved to be self-contradictory or to contravene inviolable principles. B. Lojban Mark 2. Avowedly revisionist. Changes happen through consensus (or majority view if no consensus possible), with participants more and less Conservative, but Fundamentalism not a virtue in itself. Splitting into A and B would ease a lot of the political debate. It might sound like splitting the community, but the community is already split. We'd be better off finding ways to manage the split, by putting some sort of positive spin on it, such as talking about two or three dialects, Academic (Formalist, Progressivist), Standard (Fundamentalist) and Organic (Naturalist, usage-defined). Perhaps Standard Lojban could be defined simply as what is in the current official documentation, which would relieve the BF of actually having to do any work, though people taking an Ultra-fundamentalist line presumably have a clear mandate to augment the official documentation if they want to put the work in. --And.