From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Wed Oct 16 22:01:14 1993 Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sun, 17 Oct 1993 08:02:20 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sun, 17 Oct 1993 08:02:17 -0400 Message-Id: <199310171202.AA01473@eli.CS.YALE.EDU> Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8760; Sun, 17 Oct 93 08:00:20 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3621; Sun, 17 Oct 93 08:03:14 EDT Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1993 05:01:14 PDT Reply-To: EZ-as-pi@CUP.PORTAL.COM Sender: Lojban list From: Bruce Gilson Subject: Re: news from TLI (colored by the Lojban point-of-view) X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, conlang@diku.dk To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: The proposal by Lojbab is quite inter- esting. While I myself could never conceive of being a part of it (my facility in Lojban is such that I could scarcely engage in continuous conversa- tion for any significant time in it, even if I had the time to spare) I am not uninterested in finding out how successful a project like this could be -- it is an attempt to create a Volapuek-only environment that proved to be the undoing of Volapuek, and by contrast one of the successes of Esperanto is that they do manage to function in Esp'o-only environments, despite my dislike of that language. So the ability to pull this off would mean that Lojban is demonstrating that it can in a practical sense function as alanguage. If enough people do sign on to this idea to carry it off, I hope that a report on how successful it proved to be will be posted onto the net. While I have some doubts that it can work, I wish Bob well in his attempt to advance the language to this state, because from my point of view it is a great experiment: Can a language whose grammatical structure is as unconven- tional as Lojban really develop a speaking community? Bruce