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Re: [lojban] la .alis.
On 29 Mar 2010, at 21:17, Jonathan Jones wrote:
>>> I don't mean that sarcastically; I missed the start of the conversation--what is gained by asserting that there should be no change?
>>
>> Stability, and impenetrability.
>
> I agree with the stability bit, but I don't agree that Lojban as written in the standard convention is impenetrable.
I think that the ordinary criteria of legibility would favour my position.
> A bit difficult at first,
It's forbidding and cold and unfriendly.
> and more so with Jorge's consistent lack of denpabu, but not impenetrable.
Not only does one have to learn a language whose rules of morphology an syntax are *very* different from any natural language (and that's extremely cool) but one has to do it without being able to tell at a glance whether a ten-line paragraph is a lot of short sentences or one massive complex sentence with three or four levels of nested quotation or what.
Maybe that's attractive to people with a lot of maths or with ADD or some other kind of genius. As a trained linguist, expert in the world's writing systems, type designer, and typesetter, I can say that it is extremely off-putting. The eye has nowhere to focus.
> (I would like to state that in my own experience, the difficulties I had when first reading Lojban have since been reversed- that is, what once difficult to read due to lack of that which I am used to seeing in English text is now difficult if those elements *are* there- with the exception of white space, and not counting my difficulty in reading {lonu lojbo bacru cu na ponse lo denpabu} ("Lojban without the {.}").)
Except that you say that you don't ever see such elements in Lojban text -- so how can you be sure?
Michael
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