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Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that! (was Re: [lojban] Re: Vote for the Future Global Language)
Yeah, I also like lesswrong a lot. -Matt
On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:
> seconded. Totally agree. Awesome rant.
> 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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>
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