From lojban+bncCK30vq5WENHDkukEGgQYSWU6@googlegroups.com Wed Jan 05 08:52:47 2011 Received: from mail-pz0-f61.google.com ([209.85.210.61]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1PaWbL-000413-L1; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:47 -0800 Received: by pzk9 with SMTP id 9sf4122192pzk.16 for ; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:38 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=domainkey-signature:received:x-beenthere:received:received:received :received:received-spf:received:date:from:to:subject:message-id :references:mime-version:in-reply-to:user-agent:x-original-sender :x-original-authentication-results:reply-to:precedence:mailing-list :list-id:list-post:list-help:list-archive:sender:list-subscribe :list-unsubscribe:content-type:content-disposition; bh=CYUXnJOmKqgsXxqGmuwYewdfDpBKWz1MbCD/M4X0vP0=; b=UXvm1fX7I8b8KbLmUwClvXU31urP3FNvf2PLaOU6k5AqHbSkXi9py7KqJGWIQDkxw2 Hhi4yp9EJL4WHbnfkRrULz23Dhu3Gg5AdDixW855EGsXh2UgZ5pcJVDgVPgC7JNWphng tos+Q3HEAC26d6Wzg2Uk0WSDuHzNepD5EFNE0= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=x-beenthere:received-spf:date:from:to:subject:message-id:references :mime-version:in-reply-to:user-agent:x-original-sender :x-original-authentication-results:reply-to:precedence:mailing-list :list-id:list-post:list-help:list-archive:sender:list-subscribe :list-unsubscribe:content-type:content-disposition; b=55Qid6aZtErwwKztd3EMtySLHm8k8zRT3GScEB4iEMe2EQQA5HmzducSkIXNZtpSi4 nz4l3ycMaQpA6ZaOLe/1IKVEcpmsURG84AQhObKJ3QJniXZADxV2XhQViXODlMl7ffma UHtUhyON5dGukaM3rsMzXB09Rmi7jPrrplqzY= Received: by 10.142.62.31 with SMTP id k31mr1098731wfa.9.1294246353528; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:33 -0800 (PST) X-BeenThere: lojban@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.142.121.31 with SMTP id t31ls23805167wfc.3.p; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:32 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.142.43.12 with SMTP id q12mr17566025wfq.25.1294246352617; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:32 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.142.43.12 with SMTP id q12mr17566023wfq.25.1294246352567; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:32 -0800 (PST) Received: from chain.digitalkingdom.org (digitalkingdom.org [173.13.139.234]) by gmr-mx.google.com with ESMTPS id f13si24659413wfo.4.2011.01.05.08.52.32 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5); Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:32 -0800 (PST) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org designates 173.13.139.234 as permitted sender) client-ip=173.13.139.234; Received: from rlpowell by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1PaWb9-00040x-LW for lojban@googlegroups.com; Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:52:31 -0800 Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 08:52:31 -0800 From: Robin Lee Powell To: lojban@googlegroups.com Subject: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language) Message-ID: <20110105165231.GK17534@digitalkingdom.org> References: <9114501.161.1294150198377.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@yqhy19> <7c0687a1-deba-495a-9760-95d1d0649423@t8g2000prh.googlegroups.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) X-Original-Sender: rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org X-Original-Authentication-Results: gmr-mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org designates 173.13.139.234 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org 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-Disposition: inline Ivo: Sorry, this isn't really about you; you just happen to be the person I decided to respond to. Lots of people have said similar things. On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 11:02:28PM +0100, Ivo Doko wrote: > On 4 January 2011 21:57, Lindar wrote: > > > I'm -not- going to vote for lojban. It has not been and definitely > > isn't now a candidate auxlang. > > > > I absolutely agree. I love lojban, but it is far from ready to be > a serious auxlang candidate. Even Esperanto is a much better > auxlang candidate than lojban at the moment - it's true that it's > far from being completely irregular and logical and that it's only > suited for people whose native language is an Indo-European > language, but it's a fully defined, complete and functioning > language, which lojban is very far from being at the moment. "very far"? *Really*?? Y'all have weird standards/requirements. Lojban is *FAR* more fully defined than Esperanto. No, really: it is. Esperanto doesn't have a formal grammar of any kind, for starters. We know far more about how Lojban grammatical structures work than *any other actually spoken language on the planet*. We have already won that prize: Lojban is the most precisely, formally specified language that there is, for any language with its number of speakers or higher. Period. I challenge anyone to find anything even *remotely close* to the CLL in terms of covering every *possible* grammatical combination. Even if you can find such a thing, the formal grammar takes it so far ahead of everything else they can't possibly hope to catch up. That's "fully defined"; now for "complete and functioning". The reason that Lojban *seems* flaky is: 1. When people have trouble saying something in Esperanto, they simply import a word or phrase or grammatical structure from a natlang, and everyone's OK with this. Current Lojban culture refuses to do that. As a historical note, this *was* acceptable, to some extent, around the time the CLL was published, which I think was why they thought the language was all-the-way-done. See noralujv if you don't believe me; there are some natlang imports there that would cause most current Lojbanists to scream. 2. We all are a bunch of picky, whiny, geeks (that is intended more as a factual description rather than an insult), so our response to "huh, I don't see how to do that" tends to be, since we can't just import a natlang solution, "OMG LODGEBANS ARE BROKEN!!!!!1!!one!!11!!cos(0)!1!". 3. We all have a tendency to do this *before* actually learning the language all that well. The truth of the matter is that you really *can* say anything you want in Lojban; LNC and alis prove that pretty conclusively, I think. Most of the "problems" that people freak out about are already well understood by oldbies. 4. Nobody shouts "Wow this is well specified!!!" at the top of their lungs, but they certainly shout their complaints. Geeks have a shared culture that compliments are private and insults are public; it's deeply fucked up. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/ I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own vocabulary knowledge. This puts it ahead of 99.999% of conlangs. Saying that it is very far from being complete and functioning is ridiculous, and pretty insulting to a lot of people's hard work. -Robin -- http://singinst.org/ : Our last, best hope for a fantastic future. Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false" is "na nei". My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/ -- 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@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.