[lojban] Re: How many fluent speakrs of Lojban are there?

["Brett Williams" <mungojelly@gmail.com>]

On 9/14/08, joel@mentics.com <joel@mentics.com> wrote:

To me, this type of ability for a language to create words on the fly
is a fascinating part of the language. Is this really something
someone could do mid-sentence? I mean, we do it in English: it's that
lemon-round-sweet-thing-with-fluffy-white-stuff-on-top. We use
hyphens, but lojban has something a little more sophisticated.

I've just lately gotten to the point where I'm able to invent or recognize lujvo on the fly.  What I would say is that there is a lot of word-inventing going on all the time, but Lojban's vocabulary is so thin still that the words being  invented are very basic.  Swimming around in the wading pool of Lojban's few thousand active words has given me an appreciation for the capacities of a well-developed vocabulary.  A whole team of many thousands of words work together to raise the level of communication, by making each word choice a more precise affair.  You can't really invent-on-the-fly your way to that different level of precision; you just trade vaguenesses.  The raw materials of lujvo-making are just the gismu, so a nonce lujvo is generally just vaguer than a suggestive phrase of the same gismu would be. 
 
So you can't just invent a bunch of words as you're trying to say things, and invent the language all at once.  They sort of tried to do that once upon a time, it seems to me, and got really stuck in it, and the real active vocab of the language languished meanwhile.  You can invent words for fun any time you want, but in order to invent a word and really get it to stick & become the language that we use, it has to be the right word at the right time.  Lojban can't actually absorb a word for carburetor right now, because we don't have words for anything else in engines, we don't have that whole terrain.  To expand the language into a new terrain, you have to first lay down a basic foundation, & gently lead the conversation to explore it. 
 
mu'o mi'e se ckiku