Re: lojban vs loglan

[Robin Turner <robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR>]

la maikl. cusku di'e

>   Someone suggested to me that I learn loglan instead of lojban.
> I've read the LLG's account of the split... And I think I understand
> the political differences (copyright, etc).. I tend to prefer the
> more open spirit that seems to surround lojban.
> 
>   But: what is actually the difference? What are the advantages to
> learning one over another?

Anything you read on this list will be biased!  Lojban phonology
& morphology seems to be much more systematic than Loglan, and
some of the tricky logical problems have been ironed out.  More
importantly, Lojban has been baselined, so that developments in
the language consist of actually exploring the potential of what
we have, rather than an endless series of bug-fixes.  Any future
changes will be the result of a consensus of Lojban speakers. 
Finally, as far as I know, Lojban is going places and Loglan
isn't.  This is not to say that it can't - people are always
reviving moribund languages, as demonstrated by recent efforts to
promote Occidental.  "Newer" doesn't always mean "better" (look
at Windows '98!), but learning Loglan strikes me as somewhat
perverse, like people who prefer vi to emacs.

> 
>   And: if the grammars are the same, and just the words are different
> (??) ... does that mean a loglan-lojban translation program would be
> fairly trivial?

AFAIK the grammars are no longer identical, but a translation
program would certainly be feasible. OTOH, I don't see that many
Loglan texts around to translate, so programming time would
probably be more profitably directed towards refining the
Lojban->English software that we have.

co'o mi'e robin.