[lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

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

----- Original Message ----
From: Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Sunday, July 26, 2009 12:27:57 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

mi'e la stela selckiku

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 8:04 PM, John E Clifford<kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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.


This used to be true but I don't believe it is anymore.  There's a lot
of freeform conversation in Lojban these days, and a lot of words are
made up all the time. 
I'm glad to hear that; I don't check the more informal lines of communication.
There are always faddish silly words. 
Aren't they almost always, in every language -- but they are word in the language nonetheless (though more tentatively so in Lojban).
 Almostall of them do conform somewhat to the word-building rules (the only
exception I can think of being the brief fad of saying"cccccccccccccoi"), but an unreasonable number of them are "xargismu"
(as it's in style to say these days!)-- I think just because people
get used to gismu-shape as the-shape-of-a-Lojban-word.  
Well, if I remember the rules rightly (doubtful in the best of times), no lujvo can have the form of a gismu and a fu'ivla that did would be very rare indeed, so how are these words Lojban?  Leaving aside that profound (yeah, right!) question, I should note that the habit of making pseudobasic words goes back to the early days of Loglan, when it was legal -- because there were no rules for making compounds (one of the first published Loglan word -- though it was said to be in Panlan in The Troika Incident -- was 'bedgo'' a compound of (roughly speaking) 'bedzu' and 'gotso''and meaning 'go to bed'' (but you knew that).  In fact it may have been 'betgo' violating even more later rules and all done by JCB hisownself.) Your explanation is surely correct: that is the form of Lojban predicates.
Anyway it's
clear to me that Lojban has just the same distinction now as any
language between its official and its living form.
Well, except that most languages  do not have an official form and no natural one has such a harsh taskmaster as an infallible parser (if your sentence does not parse, you are wrong. quite unlike the situation in natural languages, where you may be introducing a new usage).  Lojban as a problem: its main claim to be of interest is that it is uniquely parsible; if the langauge people actually use is not that sort of thing, Lojban becomes just an annoyingly complex, hard to learn SAE language, without the charming stories of the Middle Earth languages or the chance of seeing it on the screen of Klingon (maybe the new Spock will be more accomodating). Of course, there is a simple form of Lojban which is problem free (well, there are 'cu'' and thre quantifiers)which can do a lot of of day-to-day chatting without being ungrammatical in the strict sense; but the limits are a lot close than you might think -- every subordinate clause or phraseis loaded with
 traps and don't even get started on conjunctions!)
> Does anyone feel the need to learn all the words of Lojban?


I would like to learn all the words of Lojban!  I'm fascinated by old
strange lujvo and fu'ivla.  
That's a perfectly good reason to try to learn them all but in practical terms. how often will you need the word (a gismu, I think) for ruthenium or the fu'ivla for kinkajous.
The only reason I'm trying to learn every
single one of the gismu is for completeness, though.  A lot of the
gismu are the most obscure words in Lojban.  I'm not sure that every
gismu has been used a single time.
I'd be willing to bet that some have never been used.  We don't have a definitive corpus to check; but I note that over in toki pona, which does have something very like that, two out of the total 120 words have never been used -- even in the textbook. 

mu'o


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