Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)

[Matt Arnold <matt.mattarn@gmail.com>]

Thank you, Robin. You're absolutely right. A language can be finished
even when there is an infinity of work left to be done in its
universe. Lojban has been a finished language for years. I drifted
away and lost interest not because of the language itself, but the
culture of perfectionism.

-Eppcott


On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 8:52 AM, Robin Lee Powell
<rlpowell@digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
> Ivo: Sorry, this isn't really about you; you just happen to be the
> person I decided to respond to.  Lots of people have said similar
> things.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 11:02:28PM +0100, Ivo Doko wrote:
>> On 4 January 2011 21:57, Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I'm -not- going to vote for lojban. It has not been and definitely
>> > isn't now a candidate auxlang.
>> >
>>
>> I absolutely agree. I love lojban, but it is far from ready to be
>> a serious auxlang candidate. Even Esperanto is a much better
>> auxlang candidate than lojban at the moment - it's true that it's
>> far from being completely irregular and logical and that it's only
>> suited for people whose native language is an Indo-European
>> language, but it's a fully defined, complete and functioning
>> language, which lojban is very far from being at the moment.
>
> "very far"?   *Really*??
>
> Y'all have weird standards/requirements.  Lojban is *FAR* more fully
> defined than Esperanto.
>
> No, really: it is.  Esperanto doesn't have a formal grammar of any
> kind, for starters.
>
> We know far more about how Lojban grammatical structures work than
> *any other actually spoken language on the planet*.
>
> We have already won that prize: Lojban is the most precisely,
> formally specified language that there is, for any language with its
> number of speakers or higher.  Period.  I challenge anyone to find
> anything even *remotely close* to the CLL in terms of covering every
> *possible* grammatical combination.  Even if you can find such a
> thing, the formal grammar takes it so far ahead of everything else
> they can't possibly hope to catch up.
>
> That's "fully defined"; now for "complete and functioning".
>
> The reason that Lojban *seems* flaky is:
>
> 1.  When people have trouble saying something in Esperanto, they
> simply import a word or phrase or grammatical structure from a
> natlang, and everyone's OK with this.  Current Lojban culture
> refuses to do that.
>
>  As a historical note, this *was* acceptable, to some extent,
>  around the time the CLL was published, which I think was why they
>  thought the language was all-the-way-done.  See noralujv if you
>  don't believe me; there are some natlang imports there that would
>  cause most current Lojbanists to scream.
>
> 2.  We all are a bunch of picky, whiny, geeks (that is intended more
> as a factual description rather than an insult), so our response to
> "huh, I don't see how to do that" tends to be, since we can't just
> import a natlang solution, "OMG LODGEBANS ARE
> BROKEN!!!!!1!!one!!11!!cos(0)!1!".
>
> 3.  We all have a tendency to do this *before* actually learning the
> language all that well.  The truth of the matter is that you really
> *can* say anything you want in Lojban; LNC and alis prove that
> pretty conclusively, I think.  Most of the "problems" that people
> freak out about are already well understood by oldbies.
>
> 4.  Nobody shouts "Wow this is well specified!!!" at the top of
> their lungs, but they certainly shout their complaints.  Geeks have
> a shared culture that compliments are private and insults are
> public; it's deeply fucked up.  See
> http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
>
> I can say anything I need to say in Lojban, modulo my own vocabulary
> knowledge.  This puts it ahead of 99.999% of conlangs.  Saying that
> it is very far from being complete and functioning is ridiculous,
> and pretty insulting to a lot of people's hard work.
>
> -Robin
>
> --
> http://singinst.org/ :  Our last, best hope for a fantastic future.
> Lojban (http://www.lojban.org/): The language in which "this parrot
> is dead" is "ti poi spitaki cu morsi", but "this sentence is false"
> is "na nei".   My personal page: http://www.digitalkingdom.org/rlp/
>
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