Message-Id: <199510230650.CAA19635@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Mon, 23 Oct 1995 06:46:01 +0000
Reply-To: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: Incredible!
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

Lojbab:
> I strongly suspect that the lack of elegance and beauty that And sees
> in the rafsi system is far more basic than the level that you are
> seeing "ugly". I'll let him say what his problems are, if he wishes,
> but having debated with him before on the issue, I suspect that our
> differences are based more on different aesthetic assumptions, and are
> hence subjective.

I think that if we could totally redesign the morphology and the
phonology and the phonological forms of vocabulary items then 95%
(arbitrary figure) of the current complexity could be got rid of,
and there could be other advantages, e.g. greater brevity. The
improvement would be massive. But so would the necessary relearning.

But if in the history of Lojban there has been an opportunity for
such a rationalization of the morphology, it surely has not been
within the last 25 years. According to my understanding, when
Lojban split from Institute Loglan, the goal was essentially
to clone Loglan, not to improve it. So Lojban has always been
constrained by decisions in its prior design history; there's
never been a point when one could resolve to scrap all the
morphology and start again from scratch, however massive the
improvements of doing so would be. I therefore agree with
Lojbab that "Within those constraints, I contend that the current tradeoff
is quite elegant, and furthermore, close to optimal".

Lojban is like London, which most people find much less beautiful
than Paris. But Paris is developed by means of centralized power
that rides roughshod over the populace in building its grands
projets and carving boulevardes through slums and so on and so forth.
Architects such as Richard Rogers have grand plans for the Parisification
of London, but no body has both the will and the power the force them
through.

With hindsight, I guess it would have made more sense to develop
two languages, one a speakable form of predicate logic, which could
surely have been fully baselined many many years ago, and the other a
language constantly evolving towards ideals of rationality, elegance
and suchlike.
---
And