[lojban-beginners] Re: pei UI

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Ryan Leach <rsw.leach@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why isn't it used? It seems like a concise and clear construction?


Most of Lojban hasn't been used much.  It seems like in making it
there was a sort of more-the-merrier approach: Everything was
included.  Lojban has several co-existing tense systems, for instance.
 Or as I said on the other thread, it has like a dozen different
connective systems, many of which are redundant.  There was argument
for a long time about whether to put a prepositional system, I've
heard, but in the end what we got was selma'o BAI, which is huge.  We
have more gadri than we know what to do with.  Etc.

The process of Lojban evolving into a living, social language while
still holding steady to the language definition has of course been a
process of selecting which of those tools in that massive toolbox we
would collectively become most familiar with.  Because we've done a
mediocre job of creating a systematic pedagogy, most of that selective
process has been unconscious: What's used is learned; what's learned
is used.  So it's hard usually to give a concrete reason why some
feature is avoided.  It might just be that no one's noticed it and
brought it to life.  Often threads like this one remind us all of some
feature, and lead to it suddenly being used much more-- nintadni think
they're asking simple innocent questions, but they're actually
transforming the language. :)

In this case I think we've found that ".o'u pei" (how relaxed are you)
is a perfectly reasonable way to ask whether someone is relaxed or
not, as "nai sai" (meaning "quite stressed", in context) is one of the
available answers.  Relying on this form of question as our usual way
of asking about emotions allows or produces some interesting questions
(and answers) that are different from other languages in their meaning
as well as their form, and often for instance difficult to translate
naturally into English ("How humorously afraid are you that it is the
banana with which I am attacking you?!") but personally at least I
find that quirkiness Lojbanic and I enjoy it.

la .lojban. .iu pei cizra .a'u pei
("Lojban, how much do you love it or hate it?, is weird, how
interesting or repulsive do you find that?")

mu'o mi'e la stela se ckiku