From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Fri Feb 9 10:33:08 1996 Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.2]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id KAA08458 for ; Fri, 9 Feb 1996 10:33:04 -0500 Message-Id: <199602091533.KAA08458@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id 42533292 ; Fri, 9 Feb 1996 9:55:51 -0500 Date: Fri, 9 Feb 1996 06:36:07 -0500 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: lojban evolution X-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1647 > I can't understand how newcomers like Jorge >& Goran seem to instantly know the language inside out. IN Goran's case, it may ne because he just uses the language rather than trying to analyze it all the time. And he seems intent on just being straightforward and communicative, with result that people don't need to look for arcanities - just read and understand. Esperantists seem to communciate, even those without training in Indo- European languages or semantics. maybe it is the semantics that gets in the way of understanding, as people assume things are more complicated than they really are. >In what sense is Lojban intended to be "a model of a natural language"? >You mean it's modelled ON natural language? No. Loglan/Lojban was intended as a linguistic experiment - a simplified language having what were percevined to be the necessary features of natlangs, with other features optional. It was presumed that such a language would exhibit properties of natlangs in many ways, and that the results of observing usage in Loglan/Lojban would tell us much about language in general. The formal definition of the language, would likely differ from the actual usage, for one thing, and those differences, and the evolution of the language in general, would tell us a lot in itself, yet the existence of the prescription, unlike for natlangs, would enable significant reduction in unknowns in making such analysis. (Not too well-written, but I have written this more carefully in a file on Lojban and Linguistics lojling.txt that is probably on the ftp site and likely on the WWW site.) lojbab