[lojban] Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that!

[David <00ai99@gmail.com>]

On Jan 6, 8:55 am, Ivo Doko <ivo.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 January 2011 22:58, Pierre Abbat <p...@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
>
> > Esperanto has at least one word which proves that its words cannot be
> > unambiguously parsed...
>
> There are multiple, but that is irrelevant. Like I said, Esperanto never
> even aimed to be fully unambiguous and as thousands of languages worldwide
> (Esperanto included, because it has native speakers) prove, a language
> doesn't *need* to be fully unambiguous to be a usable and working language.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Lojban is not fully
unambiguous nor is it intended to be AFAICS -- Lojban is fully
grammatically-unambiguous while culturally somewhat preferring
semantic ambiguity (since that allows shorter utterances).

>
> The main thing that Lojban lacks for being used as a global language is not
>
> > the precise definition of every corner case. It's vocabulary.
>
> I.e. it's not finished, which is what I said.
Let me point out something:
If 'lacking vocabulary' == 'not finished', then no language in
existence is finished. There is no such thing as a universal ontology,
so that sense of finished cannot be a useful distinction.

>
> ...its morphology is defined so as to prevent collisions like "avaro", it
>
> > takes
> > longer to invent vocabulary in Lojban. You can't take some Latinate term
> > that's commonly used in many languages, some of them unrelated to Latin,
> > and
> > expect to make a brivla out of it just by changing "-us" to "-o". You have
> > to
> > consider whether a lujvo would capture the meaning better, whether the
> > second
> > consonant is in a cluster, and whether the same word could mean something
> > totally different (such as "malpigi" which could be either an acerola fruit
> > or an insect's kidney).
>
> Speaking of which, I think that, unfortunately, is the main flaw of lojban.
> I understand that it can't possibly hope to be literally unambiguous if its
> vocabulary doesn't operate like that, but that ensures that if people ever
> do start to use lojban for everyday communication and if lojban ever gets
> native speakers, its so praised unambiguity will very soon melt away.
> Vocabulary assimilation is unavoidable and you can't possibly expect every
> native speaker of lojban to know which new brivla will create an ambiguity,
> so native lojban speakers would naturally start to incorporate words from
> other languages in their vocabulary, those words would inevitably create
> ambiguities, and after a couple of decades its precious ambiguity would be
> nowhere. (And that's without even mentioning other ways in which a language
> evolves when it's used by people as their main language for everyday
> communication.)

Where you say 'brivla' above, do you mean generally brivla, or the
subset which is fu'ivla/zi'evla? Because only the latter could
generate substantial ambiguity IMO

>
> So... as far as I've understood it, this is how it goes:
>
> 1) Let's make lojban the world's official common language because it's
> completely logical and unambiguous.
> 2) lojban is made the world's official common language.
> 3) People use lojban every day to talk to each other.
> 4) As was the case with Esperanto, this eventually results in people having
> lojban as their native language, who proceed to use lojban as their main
> language for everyday communication.
> 5) This makes lojban evolve.
> 6) After a couple of decades, lojban is no longer unambiguous nor completely
> logical and as time goes by is more and more like languages which have
> naturally evolved among humans.

I agree with your predictions here, they are logical; I'll bet that's
one of the reasons why historically we have said 'lojban is NOT aiming
to become a universal auxlang at all'

>
> Wait, so what was the initial reason to use lojban as the world's official
> common language? After all, lojban's unambiguity and logicality seems to be
> one of the main arguments for that, and yet if it did get chosen for that
> role it will have stopped being unambiguous and logical not long after its
> use became widespread. So if we're going to have an "ordinary" language as
> the world's official common language in the end anyway, why not chose one
> which is not unfinished?

I would be fascinated to see any language you can point to that is
'finished' in that sense.

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