On 5 January 2011 22:58, Pierre Abbat
<phma@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
Esperanto has at least one word which proves that its words cannot be
unambiguously parsed...
There are multiple, but that is irrelevant. Like I said, Esperanto never even aimed to be fully unambiguous and as thousands of languages worldwide (Esperanto included, because it has native speakers) prove, a language doesn't *need* to be fully unambiguous to be a usable and working language.
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.
I.e. it's not finished, which is what I said.
...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).
Speaking of which, I think that, unfortunately, is the main flaw of lojban. I understand that it can't possibly hope to be literally unambiguous if its vocabulary doesn't operate like that, but that ensures that if people ever do start to use lojban for everyday communication and if lojban ever gets native speakers, its so praised unambiguity will very soon melt away. 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.)
So... as far as I've understood it, this is how it goes:
1) Let's make lojban the world's official common language because it's completely logical and unambiguous.
2) lojban is made the world's official common language.
3) People use lojban every day to talk to each other.
4) As was the case with Esperanto, this eventually results in people having lojban as their native language, who proceed to use lojban as their main language for everyday communication.
5) This makes lojban evolve.
6) After a couple of decades, lojban is no longer unambiguous nor completely logical and as time goes by is more and more like languages which have naturally evolved among humans.
Wait, so what was the initial reason to use lojban as the world's official common language? After all, lojban's unambiguity and logicality seems to be one of the main arguments for that, and yet if it did get chosen for that role it will have stopped being unambiguous and logical not long after its use became widespread. So if we're going to have an "ordinary" language as the world's official common language in the end anyway, why not chose one which is not unfinished?
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