Return-Path: <@FINHUTC.HUT.FI:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET> Received: from FINHUTC.hut.fi by xiron.pc.helsinki.fi with smtp (Linux Smail3.1.28.1 #14) id m0pfBlV-0000R2C; Fri, 11 Mar 94 20:16 EET Message-Id: Received: from FINHUTC.HUT.FI by FINHUTC.hut.fi (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8890; Fri, 11 Mar 94 20:15:15 EET Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE (NJE origin MAILER@SEARN) by FINHUTC.HUT.FI (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 8888; Fri, 11 Mar 1994 20:15:13 +0200 Received: from SEARN.SUNET.SE (NJE origin LISTSERV@SEARN) by SEARN.SUNET.SE (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 8420; Fri, 11 Mar 1994 19:13:36 +0100 Date: Fri, 11 Mar 1994 18:04:11 GMT Reply-To: Matthew Faupel Sender: Lojban list From: Matthew Faupel Subject: Re: Mad Proposals II: The watered down version. X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Veijo Vilva In-Reply-To: message from Jorge Llambias on Thu, 10 Mar 1994 21:53:14 EST Content-Length: 2761 Lines: 54 Hmm... Veijo's comments provided food for thought. Unfortunately they did so after I deleted the message from my mail file, so I can't quote any of them here, but the thought that was fed was: "Well what's Lojban for anyway?" Jorge's proposal seemed to me to be characteristic of people's natural tendency to try and make their life easier as far as language goes. If a natural language has awkward corners, these tend to get rubbed off either slowly over the course of time or relatively more quickly if one language community comes into close contact with another. So, an attempt to simplify a feature of Lojban when that simplification is possible and unambiguous is (I think) a perfectly natural occurance in a language's life-cycle. This idea was so ingrained in my subconcious that I didn't even question the validity of Jorge's attempt to simplify the language *for the user*, nor my automatic equation of this simplification with improvement. Veijo's remarks on his liking of the wide range of connectives made me remember that Lojban has purposes attached to it other than just that of being a communications tool and thus, perhaps, simplifications are not in the best interest of the language. As a for instance, one of the original purposes of Lojban was to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by providing a language that was significantly different from existing natural languages. Simplifying it (for which read making it more user-friendly) could actually be working against this goal. I'm not claiming that Jorge's relatively small and logical changes would render the language invalid for this purpose, but it's something to bear in mind when considering any modification. Having said all this, I still feel that Jorge's proposals have merit, but this is because testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is probably at the bottom of my list of reasons to learn Lojban. I'm learning it because planned languages in general interest me for a variety of reasons, and Lojban is one of the few which is well thought out, well documented and supported by a core group who seem to have some sort of an understanding of linguistics where most just have enthusiasm. So, my gut feeling would be to make Lojban more usable rather than more alien. Going back to Veijo's comments on the proposal, one thing that did ring true was that the presence of duplication in the language wasn't in keeping with a well designed logical language. Allowing both A and JA, and GA and JAGI is, I think, not a good idea; if you're going to do it, go the whole hog. This of course means that we have to start using more "ku"s, but maybe with another mad proposal we can avoid this - how about removing the LALR(1) restriction on Lojban.... :-) Cheers, Matthew