On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Christopher Doty <
suomichris@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 17:21, Robin Lee Powell <
rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Acutally, no, I meant exactly what I said: Lojban was formed to test
>> the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and while that's largely irrelevant to
>> me, it *is* important to me, and many other people, that Lojban is
>> not like any natural languages in a lot of respects. Makes it all
>> mind-stretching and stuff.
>
> This is an interesting issue, I think, because I see the idea of
> "mind-bending stuff," while certainly very cool, to be diametrically opposed
> to any hope of having Lojban widely adopted as an
> international/auxiliary/talking-to-computers/whatever language--there are
> plenty of things that natural languages do which are plenty mind-bending to
> speakers of English, but they don't violate general principles of what
> languages do and what they don't do, while Lojban does in any number of
> respects.
> If Lojban wants to be mind-bending, awesome. If it wants to be a language
> which is logical and consistent, and thus primed to make in-roads in being
> widely used, also awesome. But it can't do both of those things.
>