[lojban-beginners] Re: Everyone should speak lojban?

[jkominek@miranda.org]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 07:52:02AM -0800, Tasci wrote:
> Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> 
> >I have no idea where you got these rules from.
> >
> Nothing like a good ad hominem to put me in my place, eh?  ;)

A statement about himself is hardly ad hominem.

"You're on crack, thus you are not qualified to evaluate the nature of
Lojban" would be ad hominem.

"I don't know what you're talking about" is not.

> > #1 applies to
> >selma'o UI and CAI only, as does #2.  That's about 220 cmavo out of,
> >umm, about a thousand.  So #3 covers the vast majority of cmavo.  A
> >few of the more important ones in #3, just off the top of my head:
> >.i je gi'e .e .a lo le la cu bo.
> > 
> >
> Right, exactly.  That is why cmavo are so freaking hard to learn.  
> Definitely somewhat of a hack to supplement that which brivla cannot 
> describe.  It's more elegant than English, true, but achieving that is 
> not very hard.

A hack? Without them you've got no way to put together brivla. They're
a fundamental, and important part of the language.

Look, we're here to help you learn Lojban as it is, not to help you
consider which portions of the language you do and do not find
satisfactory.

Think of it as Latin class. Sure, you hate declining nouns, but
announcing that fact to the class isn't productive for anyone.

Regardless, lojban-beginners is NOT a forum for critiquing Lojban, no
matter how dictatorial that policy may seem.  (Nor is it a forum for
discussing the policy of lojban-beginners.)

If you want to continue in this vein, I'm going to have to insist you
take it to the main lojban list, or some other forum.

> I really should find some place that lists all the types of cmavo
> (selma'o?) and at least learn the types, if not all "umm, about a
> thousand" individual thingies.

You're going to have to learn them. You don't know, and won't know
Lojban until you do.

Fortunately, the situation isn't fractionally as bad as you seem to
make it out to be. There are 122 different categories of cmavo. Many
of which you don't need to know until you've reached the intermediate
or advanced stages of learning. The grammar of each category is the
same. The semantics do differ between word within a category, but you
seem able to handle that with gismu.

I'm not sure what you've been using to learn Lojban so far, but both
Lojban for Beginners, and The Complete Lojban Language discuss cmavo.
In fact, the CLL discusses every cmavo.

-- 
Jay Kominek <jkominek@miranda.org>