From lojban+bncCIici4jiChCntJnpBBoEsWePnQ@googlegroups.com Thu Jan 06 16:11:32 2011 Received: from mail-gy0-f189.google.com ([209.85.160.189]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1PazvV-0000de-9W; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:11:32 -0800 Received: by gyb11 with SMTP id 11sf15285840gyb.16 for ; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:11:23 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=domainkey-signature:received:x-beenthere:received:mime-version :received:received:date:in-reply-to:x-ip:references:user-agent :x-http-useragent:message-id:subject:from:to:x-original-sender :reply-to:precedence:mailing-list:list-id:list-post:list-help :list-archive:sender:list-subscribe:list-unsubscribe:content-type :content-transfer-encoding; bh=tBtKE4CqadNq8Ixa8ftLCjDvSL6L5FowigRpS/aicKc=; b=h+72m4tWmCz0CGU+pl6/5G5zciAnUC6T6XvvVvWxAf7gcJIs/KKKh5bDjiEGLhzMNk nMJ4jgsSW8VJKPL5OoA+X7daWj7ly1RFi7rYEfwNIQu82WRxiyIz7Ff20WWFY4w0OAIK rUxGk6V8j6Hc2ACayGShlU7r4ediInAuRkUCU= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=x-beenthere:mime-version:date:in-reply-to:x-ip:references :user-agent:x-http-useragent:message-id:subject:from:to :x-original-sender:reply-to:precedence:mailing-list:list-id :list-post:list-help:list-archive:sender:list-subscribe :list-unsubscribe:content-type:content-transfer-encoding; b=PLwP7QIkStJ1H/PlQbo7NYjnvul34JE5TwOfTiNHfYla4mZ0gyLYOTswmx1qq5wOum rKuiiZgF7Ulv1oGUsjEmT5l1/LckQB9Isyo+XoBz3noyxCd+N4hfSh8CASbonmSnUtce wma8jhEKzWj95vDIgAFbHqBai7z+mZfO48GHQ= Received: by 10.90.237.3 with SMTP id k3mr189940agh.12.1294359079328; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:11:19 -0800 (PST) X-BeenThere: lojban@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.91.172.9 with SMTP id z9ls4058939ago.7.p; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:11:18 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.91.145.17 with SMTP id x17mr1479652agn.25.1294359078722; Thu, 06 Jan 2011 16:11:18 -0800 (PST) Received: by a28g2000prb.googlegroups.com with HTTP; Thu, 6 Jan 2011 16:11:18 -0800 (PST) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 16:11:18 -0800 (PST) In-Reply-To: X-IP: 219.90.151.41 References: <9114501.161.1294150198377.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@yqhy19> <20110105165231.GK17534@digitalkingdom.org> <201101051658.16043.phma@phma.optus.nu> User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101230 Firefox/3.6.13,gzip(gfe) Message-ID: <6c73bd82-f2e5-4ddb-ad4a-9e18930d9482@a28g2000prb.googlegroups.com> Subject: [lojban] Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! From: David <00ai99@gmail.com> To: lojban X-Original-Sender: 00ai99@gmail.com Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com Precedence: list Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com List-ID: List-Post: , List-Help: , List-Archive: Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com List-Subscribe: , List-Unsubscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Jan 6, 8:55=A0am, Ivo Doko wrote: > On 5 January 2011 22:58, Pierre Abbat wrote: > > > Esperanto has at least one word which proves that its words cannot be > > unambiguously parsed... > > There are multiple, but that is irrelevant. Like I said, Esperanto never > even aimed to be fully unambiguous and as thousands of languages worldwid= e > (Esperanto included, because it has native speakers) prove, a language > doesn't *need* to be fully unambiguous to be a usable and working languag= e. It's worth mentioning at this point that Lojban is not fully unambiguous nor is it intended to be AFAICS -- Lojban is fully grammatically-unambiguous while culturally somewhat preferring semantic ambiguity (since that allows shorter utterances). > > The main thing that Lojban lacks for being used as a global language is n= ot > > > the precise definition of every corner case. It's vocabulary. > > I.e. it's not finished, which is what I said. Let me point out something: If 'lacking vocabulary' =3D=3D 'not finished', then no language in existence is finished. There is no such thing as a universal ontology, so that sense of finished cannot be a useful distinction. > > ...its morphology is defined so as to prevent collisions like "avaro", it > > > takes > > longer to invent vocabulary in Lojban. You can't take some Latinate ter= m > > that's commonly used in many languages, some of them unrelated to Latin= , > > and > > expect to make a brivla out of it just by changing "-us" to "-o". You h= ave > > to > > consider whether a lujvo would capture the meaning better, whether the > > second > > consonant is in a cluster, and whether the same word could mean somethi= ng > > totally different (such as "malpigi" which could be either an acerola f= ruit > > or an insect's kidney). > > Speaking of which, I think that, unfortunately, is the main flaw of lojba= n. > I understand that it can't possibly hope to be literally unambiguous if i= ts > vocabulary doesn't operate like that, but that ensures that if people eve= r > do start to use lojban for everyday communication and if lojban ever gets > native speakers, its so praised unambiguity will very soon melt away. > Vocabulary assimilation is unavoidable and you can't possibly expect ever= y > native speaker of lojban to know which new brivla will create an ambiguit= y, > so native lojban speakers would naturally start to incorporate words from > other languages in their vocabulary, those words would inevitably create > ambiguities, and after a couple of decades its precious ambiguity would b= e > nowhere. (And that's without even mentioning other ways in which a langua= ge > evolves when it's used by people as their main language for everyday > communication.) Where you say 'brivla' above, do you mean generally brivla, or the subset which is fu'ivla/zi'evla? Because only the latter could generate substantial ambiguity IMO > > So... as far as I've understood it, this is how it goes: > > 1) Let's make lojban the world's official common language because it's > completely logical and unambiguous. > 2) lojban is made the world's official common language. > 3) People use lojban every day to talk to each other. > 4) As was the case with Esperanto, this eventually results in people havi= ng > lojban as their native language, who proceed to use lojban as their main > language for everyday communication. > 5) This makes lojban evolve. > 6) After a couple of decades, lojban is no longer unambiguous nor complet= ely > logical and as time goes by is more and more like languages which have > naturally evolved among humans. I agree with your predictions here, they are logical; I'll bet that's one of the reasons why historically we have said 'lojban is NOT aiming to become a universal auxlang at all' > > Wait, so what was the initial reason to use lojban as the world's officia= l > common language? After all, lojban's unambiguity and logicality seems to = be > one of the main arguments for that, and yet if it did get chosen for that > role it will have stopped being unambiguous and logical not long after it= s > use became widespread. So if we're going to have an "ordinary" language a= s > the world's official common language in the end anyway, why not chose one > which is not unfinished? I would be fascinated to see any language you can point to that is 'finished' in that sense. --=20 You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "= lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegrou= ps.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban= ?hl=3Den.