But I'm really replying because... you read lesswrong too robin?! That's awesome! I just discovered that site like a month or two ago and have been steadily making my way through the sequences. Awesome site.
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 11:52 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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