[lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

But English never does anything officially, since there is no official to do it.  Words come and go on at least a weekly basis and probably a daily one.  They appear, flourish, and disappear -- nowadays the gap between appear and flourish is sometimes measured in hours worldwide; flourish to disappear takes longer -- about  the time it takes a parent to hear about the flourishing. As for Lojban --again because of its small base -- new words are relatively infrequent (as new text is) and any attempt to officially add a new word is -- if anyone notices -- subjected to a review of the sort noted (see frabi and barfi), which rarely happens in English and, when it does, is usually after the word has disappeared.  The point is that, given a reason for learning the language and the means to do it efficiently, people will learn it however slippery the target is.It is hard to say about roots in English, since most things come in whole and only are realized as
 roots if they get reanalyzed.  In that sense, words get discovered to be roots fairly often in English, since we are great reanalyzers (my favorite is still -holic, though that is out of date by now) ('root' not in a technical sense, obviously, but one that matches the role of gismu.) 
Does anyone feel the need to learn all the words of Lojban?  Maybe all the gismu and a lot of the cmavo, but probably not even that at the start.  If you get into a field, you may pick up the relevant words, but otherwise not -- why we need a dictionary (think all those taxonomic terms, for example).
As for the inflexibility, see all the points you have just made.  The inflexibility is in a very small area of language, not including most vocabulary and all usage (within the limits of grammar).   And a good part of semantics.
Ad yes, I have forgotten why we do some of the things we do that look weird now.   I suppose the reasons are buried somewhere in your debris, but barely worth rooting for. Lojban is what it is and if you don't like it, don't take it up or go off and build a better.   


----- Original Message ----
From: Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2009 11:54:44 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

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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