In a message dated 11/23/2001 1:37:47 PM Central Standard Time, ragnarok@pobox.com writes:
Talking to computers someday (.a'o'ecai), sapir-whorf, total lack of irregularities in the grammar, and attitudinal indicators are the big ones for me. Possibly mention that despite the relative youth of the language, it already has a few hundred speakers with a discernable culture. Also perhaps the fact that it is very good at negation, which you really start to appreciate once you have given it try. I would add the connection to formal logic and the corresponding clarity and precision that is possible (but not required). I would downplay our community -- by the time it was 45, Esperanto had several million relatively competent speakers and a library of several hundred (perhaps thousand) books; even if you put Lojbans age at 10 or so, Esperanto -- with only the international snail mail of the end of the 19th century -- had many times our number of competent speakers and dozens of books. Of course, Esperanto is a pretty simple and uninformative langauge and so SAE as to make learning and translation easy for other SAEs. Come down heavy on what we definitely have: the grammar; and what we offer as interesting possibilities: attitudinals, s-w, negations, ... |