erinja:There have been discussions in the past, on limiting reform discussions to the Esperanto forums only. It was thought that by posting such a rule it would imply that reforms are somehow a possibility. You can imagine a French forum with a notice "Threads on the topic of reform are permitted only in the French-language forums". It would seem to give beginners reason to believe that this is somehow not a "finished" and complete language, if people are still discussing reforms, to the point where the forum's administrators tell you where to have the discussion.

The official toki pona forum has an interesting way of handling this...

Of course, toki pona is nowhere near as established as E-o, nor does it have as large a userbase. So I'm not saying this is how we should handle things here.

"jan nasa li wile ante e toki pona" means (crazy people want to change toki pona)

erinja:

Vestitor:Yes, I'd go for the speaking population as a whole as an authority. That's justifiable. Not the sacred, unchangeable book business, it makes for dogmatic nonsense maintained for nebulous reasons.

More like a constitution that can't be amended. It's in the founding documents that if you change this document, then what you have is no longer Esperanto, but a new language based on Esperanto. Since it's like a constitution, there's a lot of room for interpretation and for mixing and matching those fundamental elements, but the fundamental elements themselves don't change.

Can that be right? The constitution of e.g. the U.S. has been amended and it's still the U.S. Revision is not always out of the question.

That, however, is a political point. Personally I believe that Esperanto doesn't need any revision because it already works perfectly well.

Christa627:

erinja:There have been discussions in the past, on limiting reform discussions to the Esperanto forums only. It was thought that by posting such a rule it would imply that reforms are somehow a possibility. You can imagine a French forum with a notice "Threads on the topic of reform are permitted only in the French-language forums". It would seem to give beginners reason to believe that this is somehow not a "finished" and complete language, if people are still discussing reforms, to the point where the forum's administrators tell you where to have the discussion.

The official toki pona forum has an interesting way of handling this...

Of course, toki pona is nowhere near as established as E-o, nor does it have as large a userbase. So I'm not saying this is how we should handle things here.

"jan nasa li wile ante e toki pona" means (crazy people want to change toki pona)

I think this is a great way of handling things. Unless people get offended and start shouting: Mi nasa ala!

Vestitor:

erinja:More like a constitution that can't be amended.

Can that be right? The constitution of e.g. the U.S. has been amended and it's still the U.S. Revision is not always out of the question.

That, however, is a political point. Personally I believe that Esperanto doesn't need any revision because it already works perfectly well.

The US constitution CAN be amended. That's why I said that the Fundamento is like a constitution that CAN'T be amended.

Oh sorry. I misread that. Time to clean my spectacles!