[lojban] Re: lojban ills: implicit emphasis

[Robin Lee Powell <rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 03:32:45PM -0500, Ben Goertzel wrote:
> But I can see a lot of mechanisms in Lojban where, if they were
> removed, then the language would be highly difficult to use for
> informal communication.

True.

> On the other hand, natural languages are really redundant -- you
> could remove a LOT of mechanisms from a natural language and it
> would still be practically usable, because there are so many
> workarounds...

Definately true.

> With Lojban, clearly there are no (or hardly any) mechanisms that
> could be removed and still leave the language usable.....  

Not true.  You could drop all of the mekso cmavo, FA, and SE with
only very minor restrictions resulting.  In fact, (with my parser at
least), you could drop BAI, which is the largest cmavo group in the
language, as well.

That's just off the top of our (the people on #lojban) heads.

> And my guess is that there are a few mechanisms that will still be
> added to Lojban in the future to make the language more usable

I doubt that we'll see any new cmavo groups at this point, although
it's not entirely impossible.  We're trying not to change the
language any more, but only to fix serious problems.

> It seems like it has been a lot of work to add enough mechanisms
> to Lojban to make it usable without sacrificing the spirit of the
> language..

So I gather.  I wasn't around for that.

-Robin

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