Re: Mad Proposals II: The watered down version.

[Matthew Faupel <matthew@CPDAPO.TELE.NOKIA.FI>]

Hmm...

Veijo's comments provided food for thought.  Unfortunately they did so after
I deleted the message from my mail file, so I can't quote any of them here,
but the thought that was fed was:

    "Well what's Lojban for anyway?"

Jorge's proposal seemed to me to be characteristic of people's natural
tendency to try and make their life easier as far as language goes.  If a
natural language has awkward corners, these tend to get rubbed off either
slowly over the course of time or relatively more quickly if one language
community comes into close contact with another.  So, an attempt to simplify
a feature of Lojban when that simplification is possible and unambiguous is
(I think) a perfectly natural occurance in a language's life-cycle.

This idea was so ingrained in my subconcious that I didn't even question the
validity of Jorge's attempt to simplify the language *for the user*, nor my
automatic equation of this simplification with improvement.  Veijo's remarks
on his liking of the wide range of connectives made me remember that Lojban
has purposes attached to it other than just that of being a communications
tool and thus, perhaps, simplifications are not in the best interest of the
language.

As a for instance, one of the original purposes of Lojban was to test the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by providing a language that was significantly
different from existing natural languages.  Simplifying it (for which read
making it more user-friendly) could actually be working against this goal.
I'm not claiming that Jorge's relatively small and logical changes would
render the language invalid for this purpose, but it's something to bear in
mind when considering any modification.

Having said all this, I still feel that Jorge's proposals have merit, but
this is because testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is probably at the bottom
of my list of reasons to learn Lojban.  I'm learning it because planned
languages in general interest me for a variety of reasons, and Lojban is one
of the few which is well thought out, well documented and supported by a
core group who seem to have some sort of an understanding of linguistics
where most just have enthusiasm.  So, my gut feeling would be to make Lojban
more usable rather than more alien.

Going back to Veijo's comments on the proposal, one thing that did ring true
was that the presence of duplication in the language wasn't in keeping with
a well designed logical language.  Allowing both A and JA, and GA and JAGI
is, I think, not a good idea; if you're going to do it, go the whole hog.

This of course means that we have to start using more "ku"s, but maybe with
another mad proposal we can avoid this - how about removing the LALR(1)
restriction on Lojban.... :-)

Cheers,


Matthew