From a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com Sun Jun 17 10:18:35 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 17 Jun 2001 17:18:35 -0000 Received: (qmail 19209 invoked from network); 17 Jun 2001 17:18:35 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l9.egroups.com with QMQP; 17 Jun 2001 17:18:35 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta03-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.43) by mta3 with SMTP; 17 Jun 2001 17:18:35 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.252.12.6]) by mta03-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.02.27 201-229-119-110) with SMTP id <20010617171832.UTNG298.mta03-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew> for ; Sun, 17 Jun 2001 18:18:32 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] RE: Rabbity Sand-Laugher Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 18:17:49 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <27.1672a108.284c21bf@aol.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 8106 pc: > using it merely as something to argue about will not get the language to > go anywhere.> > > I couldn't agree more. But producing a pile of crap because of poor planning > and poor choices seems to me a bad way to get the language off its duff. It > may be that it will lead the next round of interested people to say "Hey, I > can do better than that" -- and they may even be right. But it may equally > or more likely lead them to say "This is a dumb language; look at the crap in it!." My hunch is that newcomers will be impressed by the quantity rather than the quality of translation, and will naively assume that the translations are noncrap. So marketingwise, the more the better. Mind you, because almost all of the admittedly tiny amount of Lojban text that I read either is incomprehensible or fails to say what was intended, I think your regular carping about these matters does the community a service: on the one hand it is good that people want to grow Lojban through abundant usage, and on the other hand it is good that you deflate any complacency by pointing out the crapness of the abundant usage. Hopefully this will prevent force of usage from conventionalizing illogicalities. I should add, btw, that IMO the crapnesses of usage are in many cases due to the excessive underspecification of Lojban grammar rather than to any crapnesses of the translator. --And.