Re: [lojban] a goodbye of sorts

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 11/13/2001 11:54:57 PM Central Standard Time, thinkit8@lycos.com writes:

spent a lot of time trying to learn the gismu so i could enjoy
reading.  and when i managed to get through whole parapgraphs of
Alice...it was wonderful!  but eventually i got tired of dealing with
the irregularities rampant in the language.  irregularities are
common in all natural languages, but one that is
supposedly "designed" should have far fewer than lojban has.  look at
the jbosnu group...nobody posts there now.  it seems people enjoy
talking about the language, but not in it.  lojban is a second
generation language, evolved from loglan.  if history repeats and a
new language sprouts from lojban, i'd like to be involved in it.  i
intend to get started on a binary-encoded language, and lojban's
design will help greatly with it.

Well, I will rather miss thinkit, while having doubts about the name and even greater ones about his hopes.  The irregularities he complained about were -- so far as I can make out his complaints -- caused by greater regularities, which are likely to be carried over to any third generation language which would count as being descended from Lojban: decomposable strings, fixed patterns for parts of speech, ultimately machine parsible sentences.  While it might be possible to improve the connections between modals and gismu slightly, maybe even without seriously affecting the "learnability quotients" (the most likely thing to go, I should think), some irregularities will remain and new ones will likely turn up in new places.  And, of course, it will be possible (even likely, if Lojan's open forum is continued) for someone else to devise yet another sense of regularity which even the best new version fails, just as Lojban failed the sense (still not very clear) that thinkit devised.