[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban is *NOT* broken! Stop saying that!
On Wed, 5 Jan 2011, Ivo Doko wrote:
...
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.)
I haven't been doing too much lately with Lojban, but back in the Loglan
days I translated about 10,000 words of text into Loglan while creating
only four new brivla (torus, to use in "bagel"; noodle; bear (the animal,
which wasn't in old Loglan); and oar). All the rest could be represented
by lujvo, if I looked carefully in the word list. I expect that brivla
will be coined rarely once the language is "complete", but novel lujvo will
coruscate off the tongues of the lojbanistani. Particularly if we pay
attention to compatible definitions and reliable combining rules.
Your point is well taken that languages drift, particularly if used by the
workers, peasants and soldiers. Even so, the scope for drift in grammar
and syntax is limited because the grammar is so well defined. I would
expect to see more drift in phoneme sounds and in the usage of words, just
as we see in natural languages such as English.
As for making definitions unambiguous, words are defined circularly by
brief texts made of other words which are defined in terms of the first
one. I think we don't really have a good handle on making our definitions
provably unambiguous; instead, our goal has been to make them less
ambiguous than typical natlangs, relying on a human's nonlogical ability to
understand what a word means when given a few cues and examples.
I think it's less useful to ask whether Lojban or Esperanto is "finished",
and more useful to ask if it can do the job proposed for it: use as an
auxlang. I think both languages get a passing grade on that point.
James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 520 Portola Plaza; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.