live cultures (was: Promoting Lojban)

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, xod wrote:

> And yet, ironically for those who think intellect and emotion are
> opposite poles, Lojban may be superior also for the transmission of
> emotional states and poetry. I have had one poet approach me with
> interest in Lojban in hopes that it would provide her with a culturally
> neutral language.

I doubt how effective culture-neutral poetry could be. Without culture or 
history, metaphor is impoverished and symbolism in non-existent. Doesn't
sound much like poetry to me.

What am I missing?

> The point approaches soon when computers will be able to deliver really
> workable real-time language translation in text.

How true that isn't.

> Of all languages to learn, English is one of the hardest,

What are your sources for this? How are measuring difficulty? What are the
language-internal implications of difficulty (on scope of expression,
flexibility of syntax, ...) Who is it so difficult for?


---------(( Christopher Reid Palmer : www.pconline.com/~reid/ ))---------

              the characters i am, made into a word complete
                              -- Meshuggah