From a.rosta@pmail.net Wed Dec 29 08:09:01 1999 X-Digest-Num: 323 Message-ID: <44114.323.1759.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 16:09:01 -0000 From: "And Rosta" Subject: RE: On international applications of Lojban X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1759 My response to the Top-Down idea of IAL or Lojban adoption is to wonder why it should be a good thing for the adopting body? Take the European patent organization: it would be a trivial task to develop a language that shares Lojban's virtues of nonambiguity and other areas of suitability to the formulation of patents but is much simpler and easier to learn; logicians have been using such languages for decades. Likewise for an IAL; if the EU did decide it would be economically advantageous (tho I think it wouldn't), for what reason (other than idiocy) would it opt for the halfarsed candidate IALs currently on the market? In my view, the Bottom-Up approach is the only viable one for Lojban and currently extant IALs. The only hope for Lojban to succeed Top-Downly is that some organization is intelligent enough to see the merits of adopting a logical language, but stupid enough to choose Lojban to do the job. (This isn't an attack on Lojban. Lojban is more complex than it needs to be for limited, formal, written applications because it needs also to be usable for the full range of linguistic functions. (I still think it's unnecessarily complex grammatically even given that, but that's not my point.)) --And.