Re: cld

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

I try to avoid even reading the political threads unless I am briefly
tricked into by titles that suggest they are about, say, quantifiers.  I
do store them away, however, and in the process of doing that I see
bits and pieces.  Thus, I found my name mentioned in connection
with a proposed (? suggested? urged? hoped-for? dreamed-of?)
Committee on Language Development.

NO!

I do agree that changes ought to be discussed and that the
discussion ought to have some influence on what changes are
made (even changes only from relative uncertainty to relative
certainty on an issue).  And I do worry that wrongheaded things
will get into standard works and thus make correction harder to
achieve later.  But I dislike putting the influence of discussion in
the form of a committee with a fixed set of members, even if I am
one of those members, even if I am principal among those
members.

Firstly, I -- and anyone else I can imagine being interested in such
a group -- will, on any given issue, either be a partisan on one side
or the other or think the whole issue is too silly to be worth
spending time on (and occasionally both).  Thus, the committee
will almost never serve as an impartial or even rational judge of
issues on their merits, but either devolve into a miniature wrangle
that mirrors that in the larger body and come to no decision until
wider consensus occurs, or toss off a decision that is hoped to stop
the wrangle but involves no particular rationale other than stopping
the silliness.

Secondly, such committees are a mugs' game at least on a par with
theodicy.  No position ever settles an issue.  No position satisfies
the disputants.  No position convinces anyone.  Every position
makes a majority angry at the person who takes the position (often
-- at least in theodicies -- lethally so).  Questions get solved only by
consensus (however achieved -- witchhunts are not to be counted
out, I suppose), never by ukase, however well reasoned (etc., blah
blah).

Thirdly, I have -- can you tell? -- done this before and have never
completely healed the wounds from the last time ("JCB" ups my
bloodpressure and my heartrate roughly 10% after 12 years). And
nothing much was changed -- and much of what was changed by
the founding of Lojban as a separate entity has been lost again by
consensus.  So the wounds are not even from a noble battle finally
won but from a minor skirmish in a lost war.

But finally, I do not share the perception of the advocates of this
committee that Lojban is riddled with defects that will require
major work to repair and that its present form is so defective that it
ought not be exposed to public inspection.   Almost all of the
questions I have seemed discussed seem to me to be soluble either
at the level of adding or interpreting vocabulary or existing
grammar or to involve very minor expansions of the grammar.  (I
admit that the rather clunky grammar we have taken as definitive
sometimes makes objectively minor changes into big deals --
witness the proliferation of  logical connectives, for example,
through all those names that sound like gross insults to Central
European ethnicities -- but a clear sense of what is needed can
usually get through even this morass with the intuitive grammar
intact.)  Most of them, indeed, seem to have involved not actually
working through the resources already available and using them to
the full (no names, but most of us know who you are -- and even
you do eventually, though occasionally without stopping the
debate).

So, once again, skip the Committee, let Lojbab and Cowan and all get
something concrete (but not *in* concrete) out there and see where it
goes.  And insist it goes where we, the users, want it to.
pc>|83