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

[Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>]

On Wednesday 05 January 2011 16:34:21 Ivo Doko wrote:
> Also, I've realised I made a typo: I meant to say that Esperanto is "far
> from being completely regular and logical
> ", not that it's "far from being completely *ir*regular and logical", sorry
> if that confused anybody.
>
> As for the title/subject, I never said that lojban is *broken*, pardon me,
> I only said that it isn't finished, which is not something I made up - I
> constantly read people both newbies and oldies ranting on about how there's
> so much work yet to be done on lojban and how every now and then someone
> will take upon him-/herself to finish whatever is left unfinished and it
> will look like he/she will accomplish it but then he/she gives up and yadda
> yadda. To me that seems like lojban is, to put it as simple as possible,
> not finished. Esperanto, on the other hand, is. Were you trying to say that
> Esperanto isn't finished either? It may not be as "fully defined" as lojban
> is, but that doesn't really say much. Esperanto never aimed to be what
> lojban aims to be - a completely logical and fully unambiguously defined
> language. Instead, Esperanto aimed to be a language which is as unambiguous
> and as regular as it can be while still operating like a naturally-evolved
> language as much as possible. In order for a language to be like that, it
> doesn't have to be as fully defined as lojban does in order to be finished,
> which is the reason why Esperanto is a finished language while lojban is
> not. Even though lojban is better defined than Esperanto, it's not as fully
> defined as it should be in order for it to be finished, because the current
> level of its well-definiteness is not good enough for what lojban aims to
> be.

Esperanto has at least one word which proves that its words cannot be 
unambiguously parsed: "avaro" is derived from the same root as "avarice", but 
collides with "avaro", from "avo" (grandfather) and the suffix "ar". Also the 
relation among the noun "brodo", the adjective "broda", and the verb "brodi" 
depends on which was formed first, unlike the corresponding rule in Lojban, 
which is that "le" or "lo" always takes something that fits or is described 
as fitting in x1 of the selbri.

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. And because 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).

Pierre
-- 
I believe in Yellow when I'm in Sweden and in Black when I'm in Wales.

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