From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Jan 05 14:34:46 2010 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:34:46 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NSHzB-0004bq-Fc for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:34:46 -0800 Received: from web50406.mail.re2.yahoo.com ([206.190.38.71]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with smtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NSHz3-0004YZ-NX for lojban-list@lojban.org; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:34:43 -0800 Received: (qmail 13809 invoked by uid 60001); 5 Jan 2010 22:34:30 -0000 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=yahoo.com; s=s1024; t=1262730870; bh=esi4aGYS86z17VHma02fqvFEEFzhLet/hcE9iIkAc0U=; h=Message-ID:X-YMail-OSG:Received:X-Mailer:References:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=hxvY5DS2dL4u77HeIpT80a847KqG3tajc81UT5SHvxDhsGrIf75mgt+arW/M9jgw3RXEbER5DxE7dAZPkO1CQmnQltZ4PHPlMjSZQeM0w7kzGjjbm+6bw0IVgXMUVRH06HYrqJa7VwgbVzPARns/CkJPhh1wHgTYtkEvia6hGHc= DomainKey-Signature:a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=Message-ID:X-YMail-OSG:Received:X-Mailer:References:Date:From:Subject:To:In-Reply-To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; b=KdDMCenCMZAj0TG2DpkOxdckP62iMglFt1Vt2w/ORQ0FdjQhqZvBD66Wk6Fltilo20DlInlrCZlfZ1krEIk/n8a0eG9kvGs/ooODfluKDePLplllxbUna+QwNS/VIMw3glkmLhsyleKG5nPu7yvdybDKLKe8nZaBzJEUnaB9j6w=; Message-ID: <883131.13347.qm@web50406.mail.re2.yahoo.com> X-YMail-OSG: pMJKDFkVM1nvbGb5GXjeQa.LgP2vSbcsjw6L8WxEzkXW0yngDJGz5LRn86Xi6xla6JUdUjyOGP3B7TBKw7yPrQ2B7qm.wIvo4fHvm..O9fPg8rNUubninIZ6.87FZyT2QLEE0NJd_fDUtfHSYBiLBlzjFTfM.ecauGiupEGcNsPeT3Hn8q2KDbT5b.d6ylqzVdsOG29E9vnSj1M68yGghGWXlsFf3sz10.nVLG0yFyIsqwKGpARDUeuFiQCgvr7xrw1aIJsR6vmmjByaRsMz.aH.10Zn34BueIGm0u3UmR1ILgWQnLRl3XXWn1npxbtYB62z0a89ZGBvXtL83M5N2ifeNJkCXARwwxoH2ehCcRNtYjvve57J24o6Mn.ozCQY85y6rphYw.Hi52KnLGQdBuwjrLUKgadtSlahEGpJzdRlH64dIZjAmYOpvWDr_eUdLHWKsfoAJKDLV.4jKJ4gOt85ZeP0zbwPwBinlpZu Received: from [173.196.20.139] by web50406.mail.re2.yahoo.com via HTTP; Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:34:30 PST X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/240.3 YahooMailWebService/0.8.100.260964 References: <8CC5AA7171DCAE9-8FA8-1F578@webmail-d065.sysops.aol.com> <55b258c21001030921o36fa5cf6s2b1047ca0ddca20c@mail.gmail.com> <27513e551001050303p37e2744bx6da04dac2a29ef6a@mail.gmail.com> Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 14:34:30 -0800 (PST) From: Lindar Greenwood Subject: [lojban] Re: Initial impression To: lojban-list@lojban.org In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis X-archive-position: 16800 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: lindarthebard@yahoo.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list > But being strange and being culturally neutral are completely > different things. A monolingual speaker of English can also look at a > text in Japanese or Chinese (assuming it is written left-right) and > get some sense of the structure from the punctuation. Likewise with, > say, Arabic, assuming said speaker knows about the writing direction > difference. But with Lojban, there simply isn't anything that lets > you structure the text in this way, and the things that you think > should structure the text (like periods and commas) are doing > something totally different. You can be culturally neutral without > making it extremely difficult to parse a text from sight... While these may be valid points, I have to point out something (and I was guilty of the same thing at one point). Do you actually speak Lojban? No? Oh, okay, then shut up. =P (zo'o) You find yourself caught up in these little minor imperfections (I was the exact same way) and you're not actually learning Lojban. The more you learn, the more you realise -why- things are the way they are. We can address absolutely every one of your concerns, or you can figure out the answers by learning Lojban. Hell, I'm also learning Japanese! I could gripe about how kanji are WAY TOO HARD TO LEARN, or about how there aren't any spaces (Oh and believe you me, I did bitch about them), but once I sat down and just started learning how things are done, I realised that it's with good reason, and it's around because it works. We have punctuation, but everything written in Lojban is said in Lojban, so we start sentences with {.i} instead of capitals and (optionally) end them with {vau) instead of periods. We've been doing it for at least twenty years and it's worked out pretty well so far. =P So, to address your concern in your previous paragraph, the quick-reading aspect of Lojban is there, you just don't know quite what you're looking for. When you're really exposed to Lojban, you'll notice that every gismu is CVCCV or CCVCV, one of two magical five-character sets with a single consonant and a paired consonant. Every cmavo is .VV, CV, or CV'V, (oh yeah, and there are some CV'VV cmavo, but those are experimental) which helps pull it out and draw it to the eye, because were there not a full-stop in front of the VV cmavo, I would run right over it and accidentally blend it in with the previous or next word, get confused because it doesn't make sense, and then have to reread it. Then CV'V and CV just look unique enough, they're obviously shorter than gismu, and it's just easy to pick out. Finally, in lujvo they're usually EXTREMELY obvious because they're way effing longer than any other word, and half the time they have .y'y floating around somewhere in there. Each word is carefully constructed with a particular purpose in mind, and if you spend the time to learn it, you realise why things are the way they are. Lojban reading relies heavily on word -size- more so than word -shape- or punctuation, so like the grammar, it's just as unusual to the English-eye. When you first start, it looks like *GIANT WALL OF TEXT WTF IS THAT A FULLSTOP IN -FRONT- OF AN I?*, but when you progress, it looks like *.V CV CV'V CVCCV CV CCVCV CV CV CVCCV .V CV CCVCV*, which breaks apart more cleanly. Even with that being a huge jumble of nonsense, you can glean just from position and size that somebody is probably saying {.i mi/do *gismu* lo/le *gismu*} etc etc. It's a right of passage to find something wrong with Lojban and then try to bring it up like you're going to improve the language before you even learn how to speak it. Everybody did that, myself included. So we're not "making it extremely difficult to parse a text from sight...", we've made it really easy for LOJBAN speakers to parse a text from sight. You're still thinking in English, and you need to start Thinking With Portals si Lojban. > I agree that something else would probably be best, although it does > have the problem of not being as "universal," although in the era of > Unicode and easily-modified keyboard layouts, I'm not sure that the > universality of the Latin system should be a motivation to not try and > develop something new.. Spend a few minutes browsing http://jbotcan.org/ideas/ and pick one you like. I did "larlermorna", there are a few more floating around there, there are some linked on lojban.org, and there are a million scripts in existence that you could potentially modify to work with Lojban. Keep in mind two things: 1. Make sure that a human could write it with a real pen on real paper. 2. If it's just a letter-for-letter change with no difference from what we have now (i.e. there's nothing featural about it), at least two people are going to say it's stupid and that you should fall in a hole. My script (larlermorna) has this handy ability to be written multiple ways and directions with the same amount of legibility, it has a diacritic system, and you can get artsy-fartsy with it and it's still legible. There are plenty of others that have interesting features, so take a look at the ones you can find on the Lojban website as well. ---- So in short, we do things for a reason, and when you really grasp the language, you'll see why we aren't keen on changing such things and why we have things the way they are. Loglan has been around for nearly 60 years, Lojban has been around for twenty-two (coming on twenty-three), so I think at this point we're pretty sure where the full-stop goes. =P I encourage you to continue to ask questions about why things are the way they are, but I assure you wholeheartedly that you aren't going to change anything about Lojban until you're able to explain, in Lojban, why it should be changed. As far as I remember, there were -two- changes made to Lojban since its inception; one was removing the word for "mushroom" (oldbies like to gripe about this, but I don't get it, especially since we have a word for fungus already), and one was the "xorlo" rule, redefining {lo}, which to this very day confuses some people that learned pre-xorlo Lojban, causes some ugly arguments to pop up from time to time regarding -exactly- how it works, and caused a huge amount of grief and stress for the people administrating Lojban at the time regarding whether or not they would do it, how they would employ the changes, what exactly it changed, and so on. ((In case you're wondering, {lo} used to be more specific than {le}, and now it's less specific.)) So you can see why we aren't keen on changing things. Thank you for taking the time to address your concerns with us! Please ask more questions, stop by the Lojban IRC channel, and even e-mail me personally if you like (I'm always glad to answer questions). We love inquisitive students, because that shows everybody that you're interested! Study study study! ((As a side note for everybody else on the list: 1. Why do people get so bent out of shape over that mushroom gismu (gumri?) that was dropped from the list? 2. Can we make an official FAQ regarding the frequent suggestions from super newbies (i.e. all the questions/complaints/suggestions I had when I started in July) so we don't have to keep explaining why we don't have an alternate script, why we don't have capital letters, why {lo mi co'e} isn't a me-ish something, why we're not better or worse than Esperanto because they aren't the same language nor do they have the same end-goals, why Unambiguous™ doesn't mean that you'll never be misunderstood (I remember somebody on Twitter saying that she'll never learn Lojban and/or actively hates it because she likes the syntactic ambiguity of English, which is silly because Lojban can easily surpass English metaphor, and even say things more vaguely or even nonsensically than English could even dream of), and why we laugh when people point out why Lojban is a poor choice for an int. aux. lang.)) To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.