[lojban] Intermediate thoughts

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Lojaban grammar is a worst-case grammar (as any reasonably complete grammar would be); it has to account for events that might occur once in 10,000 sentences or less often -- even for things that will, in fact, never occur.  Figuring out how to deal with these can be a life-time job.  Meanwhile, people fear that the language they use everyday -- with features that occur in every third sentence or so -- is unstable.  So, to calm them a bit --and to get on with the work still at hand, we need to stabilize the core: the basic bridi pattern, modifier-modified pattern to a reasonable depth (less than the good old "five plus or minus two"), embedding quotations (maybe just a few real ones, not the elaborate mass we currently have), embedding a few common abstractions, first order sentence folding, negation (at least how 'na' works), quantifiers, le/lo and a few expansions on these (though I can't think of one that is really needed at this level), subordinate
 sumti.  And so on -- add your own.

Then, from that base-- and keeping consistent with it -- solve the rest.

Unfortunately, of course, most of the controversial issues are in just that base (which is all the Lojban most people ever learn).  So get them out, hash them out (again) for a while (say a month) and then declare a winner.

On cultural words: be analytic.  Have predicates for the basic notions you want: language, cultural feature, territory, sex games, etc.and fill in with the appropriate name in the x2 slot.  New culture, new name in the slot.  If you find you want to talk about it a lot, THEN make up a predicate.

The 'five plus or minus two" rule was derived from experiments using random objects (typically numbers); it takes no account of perceived patterns (I can remember longer numbers if there are repetitions, for example) and connections.  So, things like 'klama', where every slot makes sense, present few problems as compared to some of the others, which don't (although their blatant irrelevance is sometimes a good hook).

On redundancy: there are over 4000 three consonant combinations in the Lojban alphabet, which, combined with 25 vowel combinations  and two arrangements, gives a couple hundred thousand words of gismu form (even stripping out impossibles for phonetic reasons). A random pick of two thousand (say) from this would give the kind of redundancy that Lojban needs.  Of course, this ain;t gonna happen, since most of the energy put into learning Lojban is memorizing those gismu  -- and cmavo, of course.



      

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