Re: Hello. (me newbie)

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

la .alyn.graimz. cusku di'e


>
> First I started a project to create a universal language, then I learned of
> lojban. :)

Funnily enough, I was toying with the idea of making a conlang, having been inspired
by the "Marain" of Iaian Banks's SF novels (which AFAIK has never been formulated -
probably a wise idea given the calims made for it in the books).  It was going to be
what Whorf calls an oligosynthetic (sort of mega-agglutinating) language.  Then I
happened upon Lojban by chance (I was actually looking for stuff on Altaic
languages) and decided it fit the bill better than what I had had in mind.

> (see link in sig) Basically what I want is to 1 learn the language
> for my personal enrichment.

Well, everyone has their own ideas about personal enrichment, but I've found the
experiennce pretty enriching.  I don't think I would have got nearly so much out of
learning a language that was simply another IAL.  OK, maybe I could learn Occidental
in a couple of weeks, or Esperanto in a couple of months, but I don't see what it
would do for me (nobody forward this to the AUXLANG list please!).

> 2. I want to see wheather it meets my requirement
> for a universal symbolic language

Lojban isn't a symbolic language, except to the extent that all languages are
symbolic.  If by symbolic, you mean being capable of symbolic representation, then
of course you could, though you'd need a lot of symbols.  Funnily enough, I was
considering the possibility of writing Lojban in Chinese-style ideographs.  You'd
need about 2000, though, and it took me a year to learn that number of Chinese
characters (all of which I then promptly forgot).

> or what needs to be improved.

I don't think any Lojbanist would claim that Lojban is perfect, but I can say from
experience that it's best to study and use the language for a while before deciding
that such-and-such a feature is defective or unnecessary.  Some things which
initially struck me as rather silly now make perfect sense.

> 3. I want to try
> to encode it as thought engrams, a string or pattern of numbers, that could be
> programed directly into an artifical brain or computer.

I've only come across the term "engram" in the writings of the notorious L. Ron
Hubbard, so I'm not sure what you mean by the word here.  Lojban can be programmed
"as is" into a computer - it is entirely machine-parsable.

> (this last one is an
> idea that is under development as there are many theoretical issues to be worked
> out.)
>

Depends what you want the computer to do.  If you just want it to read Lojban, no
problem.  If you're into AI using Lojban (or any other language), then the
theoretical issues could keep you busy well into the next century.

co'o mi'e robin.