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



On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 03:09, Brett Williams <mungojelly@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Exactly right.

> 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.

Well, I'd go further than this. Language is a tool. Like any other
tool, people's primary use for it to get what they want, to accomplish
their goals. The closest goals of any conlang are art (la alis,
smaller works, poems) and bridging the language gap. So far lojban has
seen quite a lot of the former, and very little of the latter. (Which
isn't to say anything bad about Lojban, by any means. Developmental
stages, etc. etc.) Art doesn't attract very many people, because
there's plenty of it in other languages. But, in specific
circumstances, Lojban as an interlang could have a very high
*instrumental* value, which I think is the only compelling
circumstance that could lead to heavy development of it. What other
situations does Lojban have a high instrumental value in?

Chris Capel
-- 
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)


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