From ted.reed@gmail.com Tue Oct 16 10:59:37 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list llg-members); Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nf-out-0910.google.com ([64.233.182.187]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1Ihqha-0000ek-Rk for llg-members@lojban.org; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:37 -0700 Received: by nf-out-0910.google.com with SMTP id 4so1438934nfv for ; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:30 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; bh=cQkB9AzkoR48xB5urXstCZvq1kunm+yW5xgR4iyxUe8=; b=DNCNBsO6Di+Mi9qHAc5bQkVwfThpgYSBFr3SYVB99/98qc1lte0oy+fPNly8SIAg8bjhyjSuticgOfNcLLb3Ag/QIAtfRWINUZNRIO0Ull6EKR0iECGfeZJQoZAM2lFx8AbS1Pq5DSUUeERQ8BRkinMq8kZszcSRTr4rBZH9CXk= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=muEsBx6rn7mfAqF3tzN3wDTWgD8XFRBreAaHmL8NJbtWVDTX4cZnPFgs8kPnXBKf5HN0zaHP2pDKsEmXZH1PA55DjxmizJifF8n6kUv/SVSQ9GWL2K/D8/eultJY4qx9t2vbbiPirOtQ4sA/FwGgJfvM7jap8IIfK4PPboK9Gfo= Received: by 10.78.149.15 with SMTP id w15mr5202856hud.1192557569776; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.78.150.15 with HTTP; Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:29 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 10:59:29 -0700 From: "Theodore Reed" To: llg-members@lojban.org Subject: [llg-members] Re: LLG AGM 2007: The Most Common Word In The Language In-Reply-To: <20071016172956.GA24966@xivas> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20071016172956.GA24966@xivas> X-Spam-Score: 0.0 X-Spam-Score-Int: 0 X-Spam-Bar: / X-archive-position: 426 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: llg-members-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: ted.reed@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: llg-members@lojban.org X-list: llg-members On 10/16/07, Veijo Vilva wrote: > I'm an old man, I'll be retiring in some twenty month after forty-four > years of work and I thought I'd pick up Lojban again, start writing. > However, it seems there will be no Lojban anymore, it will have been > replaced by Xorlo, which is something completely different. At the time, > some fifteen years ago when I became acquinted with Lojban, I wouldn't > have bothered if xorlo had been in place, Lojban would have been just > another language, nothing special or elegant about it - I'll return to > that. When I left, Lojban was a tiger cub with teething trouble and > some minor blemishes, but instead of working out truly Lojbanic > solutions like we did with the relative clauses, you solved everything > by kicking in the teeth, leaving a toothless, suspiciously malglico > looking wreck of a creature, who just sucks, deep, and very at that. That's a very strong opinion, but if I can abuse your metaphor, I'd like to point out that, if we have kicked the teeth out, we now have the ability to plug in different sorts of teeth depending on what we need. > Xorlo is an abomination. Instead of elegantly writing "mi viska le > cribe" I'd have to write something like "mi viska ro le su'o cribe" > and, even worse, instead of "mi viska lo gerku" I'd have to write > "mi viska su'o lo ro gerku poi zasti" or something even worse in > order to express even the very simplest things. The naked gadri of > Xorlo are totally useless, totally emasculated. You people can't be > serious. I really hope so, I really do. I assert that the exact quantification is less important in statements like "mi viska ro le su'o cribe" than you seem to think they are. And why not use {ja'a} instead of "poi zasti"? "mi viska su'o lo ro ja'a gerku" > This was putting things nicely, very, very gently. When I read through > the xorlo definition, I thought I'd just quietly fade away, not > bother, but Lojban has been very important to me, for a long time, > and I just couldn't let be, perhaps for the final time. You are, of > course, welcome to kick me off if you feel offended enough. However, > anyway, I hope you really think through what I said above, Lojban > ought to mean enough to you. Lojban was supposed to be something > different, a new way of thinking, not just another constructed > language, and it certainly doesn't need to be easy for any single > linguistic group of people. So you assert that the purpose of xorlo was to make it easier for just one group? I fail to see how making it more generic favors one group over another. > I am the lone non-Indo-European here, I look at things and language > from a wider viewpoint. My mother tongue is Finnish and I used to know > another, quite unrelated non-IE language quite well, i.e. Japanese. > At school I had to study three IE languages, eight years of Swedish, > seven years of German and but three years of English. After that I've > studied some French, Russian and a wee bit of Spanish. During the last > forty-seven years I've read more English than most U.K. University > students, let alone the U.S. ones, both quantitatively and qualitatively, > even very esoteric things, starting with Chaucer and Julian of Norwich > in original spelling. I know English even if my writing isn't any too > good these days, for lack of active use. Yet I'm no linguist, I'm an > IT specialist, a geneticist and a dozen other things. And I feel deeply > about Lojban, i.e. the Lojban that used to be and is now just another > endangered species among languages, apparently dying a grim death > before reaching maturity, poor child, alas. It seems to me that you are grossly overreacting here, but then, [snarky comment removed]. mu'o mi'e bancus.