[lojban] Things I Would Invent [se'o] About Lojban [.io.iu], If Lojban Didn't [da'i] Exist [.uinaisaibe'u]

[mungojelly@ixkey.info]

If Lojban didn't exist, I would wish for a language with an  
unambiguous grammar.  I would look at the languages which exist in the  
world, the human languages where phrases attach wildly with semantics  
their main crutch, the computer languages with their beautiful fractal  
organization of fragile, hollow semantics, and I would wish for a  
third way, where words with human meaning are arranged in this grand  
complexity.

If Lojban didn't exist, I can imagine myself imagining a language  
which deeply enhances the terrain of twisted & self-referential  
wordplay opened by such great artists as Lewis Carroll and Douglas  
Hofstadter, so that instead of explorations of the strange reaches of  
language, sentences which eat their own tails (like this one, dear  
Dei, does in the center of this parenthetical) could be admitted into  
the common language, could form a baseline for our future thought, so  
that the next round of exploration will find us even further.

If Lojban didn't exist, I would stare into the sea of subtext churning  
under every statement, the undeniable truth that sentences do not only  
express their factual and literal meanings, but in fact establish a  
relationship between a speaker, an expression, and their world.  I  
might imagine a language which reaches straight in to pluck these  
chords, like reaching inside of a grand piano to stroke and strum and  
hear an exaggerated resonance.  I might imagine a language with a  
whole painter's palette of attitudinal, emotional, evidential, and  
discoursive colors, so that sentences can be painted directly with  
their subtexts while their surface meanings hang plain.

If Lojban didn't exist, I would wish for a language where an infinite  
variety of new words were always at the tip of your tongue, where  
anything could be used as an affix on anything else.  If I was very  
smart, I might think to wish for a language which could make distinct  
any number of new meanings, while still producing words whose  
component parts can be recognized by relative beginners, and even that  
they could be spoken in a special easily-understood long-form where  
every affix resembles a common word.

If Lojban didn't exist, I like to think that I'd have been clever  
enough to imagine some parts of it, but on the other hand I'm sure  
that I wouldn't have been able on my own to construct so much of it.   
I believe that Lojban is something which must be done, which would  
naturally happen in our modern world even if it had not already been  
started.  You, doi all Lojbanists, have begun this great project, and  
only a fool would try to begin it again when there are your shoulders  
here to stand on.

If Esperanto didn't exist, the world would be ripe for Zamenhofs, but  
there has been an investment made over centuries in that quirky hatted  
language, and the weight of that investment is continuingly  
persuasive.  The world needs a logji bangu in a similar way-- that is,  
if it weren't here, we would redream it-- and the investment made in  
Lojban over only a few decades is already gigantic.  Lojban thus  
deserves to be believed in, strengthened & rallied around.  It is  
truly THE logical language, for us, for the foreseeable future; it is  
the logical language which we must continue to invest in, if we are  
going to lift this vision of language up so high that it can join the  
great languages of the world.

.e'osaibu'ocu'i ko sarji la lojban.

mu'o mi'e la bret.



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