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Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 18:30:09 +0200
From: selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: criticism of lojban needed
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la .van. cu cusku
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 08:44:55AM -0700, 'John E Clifford' via
> lojban wrote:
>> Let's see how that line of objections, rather than ones to the
>> cosmetics, can be met and turned into a positive discussion of
>> Lojban.
>
> I'm sorry, I might have missed something here, but "It's all crap and
> anyone could do better" is no valid criticism pe'i

If the goal is to make a language that unambiguously encodes logic, then
that's relatively easy to achieve. See xorban for one model that doesn't
add too much unnecessary baggage. Lojban does achieves it too to some 
degree, but it has so much extras that most of the language is still 
undefined. We cannot easily convert Lojban to logic due to that.

If the goal is to make a language that is supposed to be used by people
in normal everyday discourse, then Lojban does a lot better than xorban
(the latter being rather heavy on the mental stack), but even Lojban can
be difficult to parse when there is a bit of nesting, as someone else
noted.

If the goal is to make a logical language that is beautiful or good for
poetry, then it becomes more difficult to measure the extent to which it
succeeded. Rhyming works relatively well in Lojban. You can write poems
and even rap music. Xorban can't really do rhymes, because every word
has the same ending (-V(kV)*).

Then you can also look at flexibility. Here Xorban does the worst of all
the loglangs I know. Lojban and Gua\spi are equally flexible, Lojban 
probably being a bit better.

And what about simplicity? Here Gua\spi and Xorban are the clear 
winners, closely followed by Toaq Dzu, and far in the distance comes 
Lojban. Just compare the sizes of their grammars to get a rough idea.

I don't have enough information about Livagian, but it, too, seems too 
difficult for normal human beings.

And you can have a number of other goals. Verbosity for example. Lojban 
is extremely verbose (partly because all the predicates have at least 
two syllables). Xorban is verbose, but much more efficient in its 
encoding of logic, and is the only language that I know which perfectly 
handles co-filled argument places (though this is also what makes it so 
hard to speak). Gua\spi seems to fare slightly better than Lojban, but 
it has its clumsy parts. Toaq Dzu to my knowledge is the most succint 
loglang.

I could write more, but this should be enough to show how hard it is to 
say whether or not a language succeeded.

mi'e la selpa'i mu'o

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