Re: Dr. James Cooke Brown

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@uic.edu>]

And Rosta wrote:
<snip>
> >I very much expect
> > that if reunification of Loglandia were linked to redesign, then it
> > would be vetoed in any referendum.

Rex May wrote:

>
>Yes, I realize that. My thinking is that the two vocabularies are by now
>almost completely different, and if things were to get to the point where
>a compromise language were to be considered, which _would_ entail
>relexification, why not take the opportunity to do away with those
>awkward allomorphs, not to mention the rather monotonous
>CCVCV/CVCCV's. The great attraction of Loglan for me has always
>been the _grammar_. Its word-derivation is a completely different
>matter, and can be dispensed with without taking a thing away from
>what I consider the true genius of the language. Anyhow, it all goes
>back to my article in TL printed, gad, must be 20 years ago. If anybody
>is interested and has never seen that article, I'll be glad to elaborate.
>--rx


As lojbab has said, "lojban is Loglan"; that is lojban is a 
realization of Loglan.

I learned all of the original Loglan predicates and maybe 30% of the 
articles in 1979. After subscribing to both listservs for quite some 
time, I switched over to learning the lojban lexicon, as there simply 
wasn't very much activity on the Loglan list. Weeks would go by with 
no postings. The lojban list is very active. Sometimes *too* active! 
Those with slow modem connections may want to subscribe to the daily 
digest version of the list.

Speaking from experience of a being a Loglander, learning the lojban 
gismu and cmavo is really not so bad. The real challenge with 
Loglan/lojban is understanding the conceptual basis of the language. 
The languages are conceptually equivalent, the only difference being 
that lojban has been more extensively "debugged". Using some of the 
software that is available for free from the lojban web site, one can 
rapidly gain command of the lojban words.

Although I personally prefer the Loglan words, probably because I 
learned them first, it seems unlikely to me that relexification of 
lojban is going to happen. lojban is already baselined, the grammer 
is published, there is an active community of online lojbanistanis, 
the dictionary is coming, and we even see the glimmerings of a 
textbook. It is important to understand that Loglan was *never* 
baselined.

In my judgement, there is simply not the manpower nor the will to do 
what is necessary to independently get Loglan to baseline. At this 
point, it is still a language "under construction", which tends to 
discourage anyone from learning the language, as it will very likely 
change should a baseline be attempted. There are a few 
inconsistencies and some areas of incompleteness in the Loglan 
grammer. There is no complete dictionary of predicates. There are 
inconsistencies in the place structures of Loglan words, even within 
the last published documentation of the language. I don't think 
there exists a full grammer. At least I haven't seen one. I suppose 
one could simply make a new Loglan which is identical to lojban in 
grammer, but has the Loglan words instead. That would be nearly 
painless for Loglanders and would be fairly straightforward.

It is certainly important that the two communities treat each other 
with mutual respect during the fusion of the two languages. I like 
the <hoa, xo'a> formalism. If this is done, both communities will 
have a viable means of communicating unambiguously in the same forum. 
Given the greater size and vigor of the lojban communit, I would 
predict that the Loglan lexicon will eventually become an alternate 
historical lexicon, sort of like ancient Greek is to modern Greek.



Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria