[lojban] Re: How to spread the word

[Auke Booij <auke.booij@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 04:28 +0200, Roman Naumann wrote:
> On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote:
> > Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical
> > and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas.
> > And then they come to strange conclusions.
> 
> This is a very good point in my opinion.
> During the last few months, I have starting studying
> various works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
> and Kant in German, which is my first language.
> Quite often, I could not be sure how far
> an 'and' ("und") extends, or how many scopes
> were terminated by a ','.
> Maybe sounding trivial, in descriptions of abstract thought constructs,
> the difference often is very important.
> Whenever I find such a place, I realize the significance
> of grammatical unambiguity.
Cool, someone simply agrees with me! Now, for the practical solution,
can you be so kind as to give us a few examples? Of course, I'll write
down every ambiguity (both grammatically and dictionarirarilarily) and
mail them as soon as I have a substantial amount, but I guess you're
more into this.

> I am confident lojbanic works are innately capable of achieving
> a higher level of denseness, - given the structure of thought
> takes the lojbanic features into account.
Again, let us try and find examples, for these will be of great value in
this discussion.

> But it's not only 'denseness' as in shortness. Nowadays, 
> I think it can be said to be commonly accepted
> that good (English) style (educational) is writing in short, simple sentences.
> In German, it's often even suggested to read the English (educational) books 
> instead of the German ones, as they are less cryptic.
> Old German (I don't really know about old English or other languages), 
> however, is something very different. Sentences of more than a page are no 
> exception. Complex thoughts are not put into several sentences,
> but more often than not described as one.
A small sidenote to this: I, personally, simply *need* to find an elegant and logical framework in everything I learn (or at least try to learn). This appears to be the easiest with complex sentences. The difference with the problem you're indicating is that in "my" ideal text, there wouldn't be that many subsentences, but just a full explanation with all its characteristics. In your case, the problem is subsentences, which indeed are handled better in Lojban.



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