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Date: Fri, 31 May 2013 05:35:03 -0400
From: Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla
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 Content preview:  Betsemes wrote: > On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:49 AM, Pierre
    Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote: >> There are countries with laws on the
   linguistic forms of allowed names. >> Iceland requires that names be declinable
    in Icelandic. Turkey prohibits some >> non-Turkic letters in names, which
    annoys Kurds, who use these letters in both >> names and ordinary words in
    their language. Why shouldn't Lojbangug have such >> a law? > > Because Lojbangug
    doesn't exist, it's fictional and Lojban has not > been accepted anywhere.
    The need for such a law makes even the most > remote possibility of Lojban
    being adopted even remoter. [...] 
 
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Betsemes wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:49 AM, Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote:
>> There are countries with laws on the linguistic forms of allowed names.
>> Iceland requires that names be declinable in Icelandic. Turkey prohibits some
>> non-Turkic letters in names, which annoys Kurds, who use these letters in both
>> names and ordinary words in their language. Why shouldn't Lojbangug have such
>> a law?
>
> Because Lojbangug doesn't exist, it's fictional and Lojban has not
> been accepted anywhere. The need for such a law makes even the most
> remote possibility of Lojban being adopted even remoter.

Why?

For Lojban to be meaningfully used, we have to insist on grammatical 
usage.  That we do so doesn't mean that no one will ever adopt Lojban.

> All this argument falls apart if you argue that Lojban is not intended
> to become mainstream,

Becoming "mainstream" and becoming "adopted" - these are fuzzy words, 
and I am not sure what you mean by them.

Lojban has been adopted - by "lo jboce'u"

At what point would it be "mainstream"?  When it displaces English and 
other contenders as the de facto world interlanguage?  Not likely in my 
lifetime, or yours.

> but if so then what's the point of making a  language if it's not intended for real use?

Well, there seems to be a lot of answers to that, if one looks at the 
plethora of conlangs in the world.

But of course Lojban was and is intended for "real use" and it has 
achieved such "real use", for example in the household of Robin Powell.

> I favor them to be merged. It'd simplify the grammar,

So what?

Pidgin Lojban might be simpler, but it wouldn't be real Lojban.

>making Lojban more attractive to the mainstream.

Why would a simpler grammar be more attractive to the mainstream?  Every 
natural language is several orders of magnitude more complex than 
Lojban, and most artificial languages are, as well (because they rely on 
conventions from natlangs that are highly complex - see my comparison of 
Lojban to the 16 rules of Esperanto, which is somewhere on the website.)

Anything that would make Lojban "more attractive to the mainstream", as 
you seem to use the word, probably would render it unworthy of anyone 
desiring it to be used.

If Lojban ceases to be a predicate language, what's the point?

Personally, the thing that probably keeps most people from learning 
Lojban is the same thing that keeps them from learning nay other 
language, natural or artificial.  That is vocabulary.  Adults need a 
couple thousand words of vocabulary in order to comfortably talk about 
the things that they want to talk about, or maybe a lot more, and 
learning a couple of thousand words is HARD for most people.  No 
simplification of grammar is going to eliminate that problem.

lojbab


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