[lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

John E Clifford wrote:
  But
> 1) the strict inflexibility of the baseline, insofar as it depends upon 
> people not wanting to relearn or scrap what they have worked so hard 
> for, is on weak ground: English changes much faster 

I'm not so sure.  English takes decades to delete a word, and never does 
so "officially", like we did in an hour or so with "gumri".

English adds words rather readily, but so does Lojban.  English does not 
add roots or cmavo quite so quickly, and again, never "officially" - 
such a word may be added by one speaker but take decades to become 
accepted enough to be added to a dictionary.

-- and often more
> dramatically -- than Lojban could ever hope to (it's a function of 
> having a billion speakers, give or take), yet no on complains or gives 
> up trying to learn it:

No one feels any obligation to know all of the words of English.

> But the baseline is
> not mainly based on this need, so that doesn't really matter (nor is it 
> as inflexible as some would portray it). 

It is pretty inflexible, in that we aren't likely to consider changes 
while we haven't finished defining the status quo.

> 3) I like the idea someone (sorry, I can't check back while I'm typing) 
> put forward that, if a lujvo got popular, we would drop rafsi out of it 
> at a great rate.   This seems a rather likely (or, at least, useful)
> solution for  avoiding the Zipf's wall, that affects all fixed 
> source-vocabulary languages. 

I wrote that, but I probably stole the idea from you in our discussions 
back in the 80s %^)

(Such is true of far more of the language than most people realize, 
probably including you these days %^).


lojbab


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