From reid@xxxxxxxx.xxxx Fri Feb 19 12:09:10 1999 X-Digest-Num: 65 Message-ID: <44114.65.273.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 14:09:10 -0600 (CST) From: Christopher Palmer {zo'osai} the fact that people _do_ write poetry in Lojban! Yeah, I knew about that. > {pe'i} Lojban is culture-free in the sense of not being confined to any > particular culture, not in the sense of being culturally sterile. Okay. That clears up my confusion. > Things which make English difficult irrespective of this are its massive > vocabulary, But again, people coming from different L1 backgrounds have different amounts of trouble with this. If your L1 is a Romance language or a Germanic langauge, you have half of the vocabulary already, but if your L1 is Algonquin, you have nothing to start with. So difficulty is not equal for different people. > stupid spelling No daut. > and heavy reliance on metaphor. Show me a language that *doesn't* rely heavily on metaphor, and I'll show you a proglang. :^) > http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309/ial.html Eeek! IALs! *cringe, hide, run* :^D Actually a well thought-out and informative essay. Thanks. :^) ---------(( Christopher Reid Palmer : www.pconline.com/~reid/ ))--------- the characters i am, made into a word complete -- Meshuggah