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Re: [lojban] Re: Initial impression

Thanks Craig and others for the great responses! Of course, I shall give it a little time to settle in. Quirks I like, but upon seeing the first real Lojban text, the translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis, my eyes were truly bleeding. Even the first blurb of cyrillic that I ever saw was easier to read than that. It's because how humans read text as opposed to machines. The parser gobbles up character by character and is not bothered by how it looks like. But humans don't read that way, except in while they're learning in childhood. Humans capture entire sentences or at least parts of them as a whole image, and then break it further down. Make an experiment: Blur your vision seeing a piece of English text versus Lojban. Capitals and interpunction stand out and thus give an immediate impression of the overall structure in English. That makes things a whole lot easier. With few remaining imperfections that can irritate capture (apostrophe for genitives, period for abbreviations), this has evolved over centuries for a good reason and is now thrown out with no adequate replacement. Beautification is not an end in itself, it has very practical utility. Think Feng Shui: Although it is quite unscientific as there is no real energy flowing around, it deals a lot with humans' perception of their environment. There are more modern approaches now tackling theory of perception, even preconscious processing, but not all of that is necessary study, when a little sense for aesthetics helps progress just as well. But neglecting the mechanisms of human perception will not help gaining acceptance of a language with an otherwise brilliant concept. 

Cheers :)

Klaus
On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:21:15 +0100, Craig Daniel <craigbdaniel@gmail.com> wrote: 


...
There are three; I'll address them individually below. But personally
I think once you get used to it (which only took me about two weeks)
they're really not so bad.

...