[lojban] Re: Philosophical differences.

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

mi'e la stela selckiku

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 3:59 PM, John E Clifford<kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
li'o
> 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?


Well I personally discourage the invention of xargismu, though like
many people these days I'm partial towards "kibro" (cyber).  But it
shows the difference between a prescriptive and a descriptive
perspective on modern Lojban, since in actual fact xargismu are some
of the most commonly invented words.

Incidentally I think that particular sickness could be cured by having
more fu'ivla in common use, so that newbies can follow them and find
fresh healthy sparsely-populated fu'ivla spaces.  For instance, I
didn't know until a few years ago that the .VCCV fu'ivla space
existed.  If we had a few common .VCCV words everyone knew (one of my
favorites is ".otpi", a bottle shaped object which may or may not have
a lid) then newbies would be attracted by that less taboo glittering
gem.  It's a smallish space so soon enough it would be crowded too,
but meanwhile our language would be that much the richer for it.


li'o
> 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).
li'o


Again that makes sense in theory, but I'm not sure it matches the real
situation.  What we actually have is two respected parsers, camxes and
jbofi'e.  There are various (arguably obscure) situations in which one
or the other of them are broadly considered to be flat wrong, and I
believe there are situations in which both of them are wrong.  The
consensus dialect is entirely parseable, but there is to my knowledge
no parser that fully captures it, apparently on account of laziness.
(There's also Xorxesese, which is even more easily parsed, but doesn't
have a parser for political reasons.)

The parsers are both interesting in theory and useful in practice, but
I think there's a deeper value to that abstract language itself which
we all understand using our own wetware (brain) parsers.  Lojban has a
special kind of grammar, which can (at least with years of practice!)
be fully used and deeply understood by an unaided human mind.
Computers will soon be able to parse even ambiguous grammars, but
there will continue to be something unique about Lojban's structure.


mu'o


To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.