Re: Lojban: You're Doing it Worng (was: Re: [lojban] la .alis.)

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 10:35 AM, Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "{ta'u}" doesn't seem to serve any purpose;


I use {ta'u} regularly.

I strongly support our moving to a model of governance where we can
get anything done, but that does not mean that we are about to throw
everything out and start over!  We are going to make conservative,
commonsense changes to the official language to bring it into
alignment with usage and rationality.  It's not a language redesign.

For one thing, if you want a lean, efficient, consistently organized
loglang then the simple fact is that Lojban is not a good starting
point!  I'm working on a loglang myself at the moment, one with
approximately 5 grammatical rules, which I'm sure is enough, and
probably more than enough.  Lojban's grammar is ornate, baroque.  It's
not going to become a lean, minimalistic language by cutting a few
things here and there.  Creating a minimalistic loglang is a sensible
idea, but creating one by simplifying Lojban (and simplifying, and
simplifying, and simplifying) would be madness.

Also, and more importantly, Lojban is not a theoretical language.
Alice, lo nu binxo, la nicte cadzu, la grutrduriani, Esther, Terry the
Tiger Visits the Big City, etc., plus decades of mailing list and IRC
logs, form our corpus.  That might not seem like much coming from the
outside world, but to us this is our carefully accumulated history,
this is what we are that makes us an actual linguistic culture and not
any old toy conlang someone's just sketched out.  Any changes to the
language that cause new students to be less equipped to read what
we've written would not only do violence to our history, but directly
insult many who are still with us and have put considerable effort
into using this strange language as it stands.

Lojban is a living language; first do no harm!


mi'e la stela selckiku
mu'o

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.