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On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> cu'u la xod.
>
> >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.
>
> Most will, though. Try selling a substance interpretation of {lo} to
> Jay...
I can't proxy for Robin, but I suspect he'd be a bit more amenable to the
establishment of consistency than you might think.
>
> cu'u la .and.
>
> >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.
>
> Damn. A is what the charter says. If I'm forced to choose (and I know
> you're not forcing me, but I may be forced), I choose A. I want to
> allow a little bit of 'Microsoft' --- a few extra cmavo. In fact the
> charter does say the BPFK can do B if they wish --- if they get
> consensus; and it's up to the membership to accept it.
Let's establish a few guidelines here. In places where the CLL is
demonstrably broken, the only responsible thing to do is to "contradict"
it. (How do you contradict a contradictory text?). The baseline was broken
on vo'a, giving one definition in the CLL and another one in the ma'oste.
The CLL is broken on masses. (I will break this up into small sentences so
I am understood. It is not broken because I find the book's definition to
be ugly. It's broken because it's ambiguous, conflating two concepts. And
because this conflation has not received an adequate defense from anyone.
And the usages were used in contradictory manners, just like vo'a was.)
And lo'e is broken until we figure out which of the at least 5 possible it
does or should have.
So Nick, be a fundamentalist, but that's only an option in cases where
there is a self-coherent fundamentalist line. If fundamentalism means that
the BF will leave behind incoherency, you might as well not spend your
time at it -- that's how things already are!
I also think that we might be overstating the importance here. How many
active writers are there? I think that Jorge and I will follow the
Excellent Solution, no matter what Nick and Jordan say. I like it, and I
am going to smoke it. Because I have already resigned to my own need to
learn Lojban from scratch anyway ever since you formalists pulled your
word-order coup. The CLL didn't reveal that, but "there" it was. So this
time, I'd like what I learn not to be broken. And if that means a
"different dialect", tough!
--
// if (!terrorist)
// ignore ();
// else
collect_data ();