Re: lojban dialectology

[Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

> More on this.  Again comparing with Esperanto, I have gotten the impression
> from Esperantists other than Jorge that the kind of deates that we are having
> on Lojban List are exactly the kinds of things they disdain within the
> ESperanto community as well.  There seem to be a lot of Esperantists who
> look down on us for always talking ABOUT The language rather than in it.

A good fraction of the discussion in soc.culture.esperanto is about the
language. These days, almost 100% is in Esperanto. Thanks to the growth
of internet in non-English speaking parts of the world, native English
speakers are no longer the overwhelming majority in the group, although
they still constitute the first minority by far. If people with no interest
in grammar look down on people who do have an interest, it is the problem
of the down-lookers, I would say.

> Maybe if discussions of how to say it only took place in Lojban, we could
> have a counterargument %^)

But we do have such discussions in Lojban. It would be hard that all of
them were in Lojban because most of us are beginners, but the number of
people that post in Lojban is growing ui!

> (And since John and I don't read the Lojbvan text that
> is posted, we wouldn't be distracted by it!)

Right, so the grammar would be a description of some entity only vaguely
related to the Lojban in actual use. If you don't want to be distracted
by discussion then you could simply not read it even when it is in
English.

Jorge