Re: [lojban] Response to Robin's "Essay on the future of Lojban"

[And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>]

Bob LeChevalier, On 10/04/2010 08:37:
> Arguing with And Rosta gets me upset because it seems clear to me that 
> he isn't much interested in whether the language is something people can 
> and will use to communicate - he wants more formalization and logic. And 
> your essay suggests that the "activists" of the community may be closer 
> to his camp.  I am less certain where you personally are, but you have 
> considerable credibility with me because you can and do use the language 
> competently as it is (as does xorxes)

You misunderstand my views and (without malign intent) caricature them. Here are my key views.

1. A language is a tool for communication.
2. A usable logical language (which I take to be one that unambiguously encodes predicate--argument structure in a way that is no more longwinded than natural language and that is within general human cognitive abilities) would be a wonderful tool to have. Partly this is because we could potentially learn so much from the tool itself. But partly it is because *using* such a tool to *communicate* could be a great boon to the world.
3. Lojban is not a usable logical language and can't be tinkered into one. [I used to think it could perhaps be tinkered into one.]
4. The community of Loglan/Lojban project is the focal community for people with an interest into bringing into being and into use a usable logical language. Not everybody in the community has that interest, and not everybody with that interest is in the community, but there is no other community of people with this interest.

It seems to me that those views take me outside the scope of the debate Robin has initiated, since they don't pertain to Lojban proper. With regard to Lojban proper, I have no particular personal stake or agenda, merely goodwill to the community. I naturally find it easier to sympathize with those who wish for the key foundations of the language to be regular and explicitly declared rather than to merely emerge, in the manner of a pidgin, from usage, so I'm happy to give Robin what support I can. And I *genuinely* can't understand on what grounds you think it would be a good thing for the specification ('prescription' in your words) to remain unchanged and for such a language's speech community to grow, or on what grounds you think that the possession and lack of comparative fluency in this pidgin respectively confer and deny credibility.

--And.

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