On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 2:51 AM, Michael Everson
<michael.everson@gmail.com> wrote:
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?
Becuase examples of such text have been made, including in this discussion thread. And I said I don't see them used. That is, people who frequently write in Lojban don't use them, which is not the same. The CLL has an example of such possible usage, which you pointed out yourself.