On 6 January 2011 00:27, Jim Carter
<jimc@math.ucla.edu> wrote:
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.
I'm not talking about how lojban native speakers will come up with new words for things they don't have a word for. What I'm talking about is that speaker(s) of lojban will be introduced to a new invention/concept/thing which will have been named by people who don't speak lojban (but, for example, English) and lojban speakers will like the name those people have given it and will thus simply incorporate that word in their vocabularies and, thus, in lojban. It's just like French "écran" and English "software" got incorporated into Serbo-Croatian as "ekran" and "softver". Sure, purists didn't like that and invented replacement words, namely "zaslon" and "omekšje", respectively, but those words are simply not used and have failed to replace "ekran" and "softver" and these two have become a part of Serbo-Croatian vocabulary. Same thing would happen with lojban - purists would invent lujvo (or brivla) to replace the direct loanwords in order to leave the language's unambiguity intact, but people who don't care about whether the language is completely unambiguous or not (who would, mind you, make up a great majority of lojban speakers if it did become world's official common language) would not cease to use the loanwords in place of the new "proper" words and lojban would get screwed up pretty quick.
Of course, you could say that lojban is what a special committee of purists says it is and that people who don't use only the words which have been approved by the committee don't speak lojban, but no one would agree to make such a fascistic language the world's official common language and even if they did no one would give a crap what the committee says and lojban would still be what is spoken and not what is approved.