From robin@xxxxxxx.xxx.xxx Mon Mar 1 08:10:16 1999 X-Digest-Num: 78 Message-ID: <44114.78.474.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1999 18:10:16 +0200 From: Robin Turner > First I started a project to create a universal language, then I learned of > lojban. :) Funnily enough, I was toying with the idea of making a conlang, having been inspired by the "Marain" of Iaian Banks's SF novels (which AFAIK has never been formulated - probably a wise idea given the calims made for it in the books). It was going to be what Whorf calls an oligosynthetic (sort of mega-agglutinating) language. Then I happened upon Lojban by chance (I was actually looking for stuff on Altaic languages) and decided it fit the bill better than what I had had in mind. > (see link in sig) Basically what I want is to 1 learn the language > for my personal enrichment. Well, everyone has their own ideas about personal enrichment, but I've found the experiennce pretty enriching. I don't think I would have got nearly so much out of learning a language that was simply another IAL. OK, maybe I could learn Occidental in a couple of weeks, or Esperanto in a couple of months, but I don't see what it would do for me (nobody forward this to the AUXLANG list please!). > 2. I want to see wheather it meets my requirement > for a universal symbolic language Lojban isn't a symbolic language, except to the extent that all languages are symbolic. If by symbolic, you mean being capable of symbolic representation, then of course you could, though you'd need a lot of symbols. Funnily enough, I was considering the possibility of writing Lojban in Chinese-style ideographs. You'd need about 2000, though, and it took me a year to learn that number of Chinese characters (all of which I then promptly forgot). > or what needs to be improved. I don't think any Lojbanist would claim that Lojban is perfect, but I can say from experience that it's best to study and use the language for a while before deciding that such-and-such a feature is defective or unnecessary. Some things which initially struck me as rather silly now make perfect sense. > 3. I want to try > to encode it as thought engrams, a string or pattern of numbers, that could be > programed directly into an artifical brain or computer. I've only come across the term "engram" in the writings of the notorious L. Ron Hubbard, so I'm not sure what you mean by the word here. Lojban can be programmed "as is" into a computer - it is entirely machine-parsable. > (this last one is an > idea that is under development as there are many theoretical issues to be worked > out.) > Depends what you want the computer to do. If you just want it to read Lojban, no problem. If you're into AI using Lojban (or any other language), then the theoretical issues could keep you busy well into the next century. co'o mi'e robin.