Date:  Fri, 31 Oct 1997 09:01:16 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <199710311401.JAA17719@locke.ccil.org>
Reply-To: Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@MATH.ACAD.BG>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@MATH.ACAD.BG>
Subject:      Lojban's conciseness
X-To:         lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
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X-From-Space-Date: Fri Oct 31 09:01:29 1997
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Edward Cherlin wrote:
> At 10:26 PM -0700 10/26/97, Irene Gates wrote:
> >la .iVAN. cusku di'e
> >> I think the regularity is a real one:
> >> my appreciation of APL and of Lojban share the same source --
> >> a liking for the unusual plus a fondness [for] conciseness.
> >
> >.a'a .a'u .ie  [...]  I did give it some thought [...] and came to
> >the same conclusion that Ivan did, although pe'i su'a Lojban is only
> >really concise when it comes to the attitudinals and things.
>
> Actually, Lojban is very concise for complex tenses [...]

That's a good point.  I've often tied myself in knots trying to explain
the meaning of some Slavic derived verb or inflected verb form in English,
and that experience has made ZAhO one of my favourite selma'o.  (Whether
ZAhO as defined are really adequate for the purpose is a matter I haven't
yet looked at, however.  Some day when I have leisure ...)

What I had in mind when I mentioned conciseness, though, was the area of
tanru and abstractions -- especially the way you can use predicates with
some of their arguments already set for either purpose.  I suppose my
translation of `The Tale of the Staircase' (published in _JL_ some
time ago) reflects my liking of the {broda be ... bei ... be'o brode}
type of tanru quite well.

> It does suffer considerably from the efforts of developers who didn't
> understand what they were building, but that's normal in any new area
> of math, software, and conlangs.

That's normal in a conlang which strives to incorporate theoretical
linguistics into its design, because our knowledge keeps growing and
our ideas evolve all the time, so that no one can claim to understand
fully what he is doing.  You can make your conlang better (in a sense,
of course) than the rest by being the first to take into account some
recent development in the field, but you can never know when it will
be superseded by something slightly or vastly different.

--
`Meum est propositum in taberna mori;    Vinum sit appositum sitienti ori:
 Ut dicant cum venerint angelorum chori "Deus sit propitius isti potatori".'
                          (Archpoet of Cologne, `The Confession of Golias')
Ivan A Derzhanski                              <iad@banmatpc.math.acad.bg>
H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria  <http://www.math.acad.bg/~iad/>
W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences