| In a message dated 6/19/2001 9:42:16 PM Central Daylight Time,
xod@sixgirls.org writes: ru'a dada'o nabmi fi le zu'o za'o lanli le jbovalsi bau le glibau .i mu'a Gee, too bad xod will miss this, but I think he is right that we get into trouble because of discussing Lojban in English. Not that we would do better in Lojban. The English problem is the dreadful techinical vocabulary that has been a charateristic of Loglan/Lojban since JCB's hideous "metaphor" ({tanru}) at least, "empathy," "assertion," and even "proposition" are now causing problems. As for doing better in Lojban, have you read the Lojban messages lately. They are like the old messages for your Captain Midnight decoder ring: they take a long time to decode and then turn out to be utterly banal, So much effort goes into getting it into Lojban that there is little left for having something to say. I urge people to keep them up, of course, since they can't get better until they come easily. But for serious work, we'd better stick to a language we can think in. (Another problem with Lojban discussions is that, since there is no Lojban culture but the language, we have no other topics to discuss and yet the language has nothing to build upon for real cases to test the discussion. It's a vicious circle and it is harder to build the culture that the language skills.) |