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

Ivo Doko wrote:

    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.
By that reasoning, no language is "finished", since no language has vocabulary that is not continuously being added to, and no language has definitions for all of its words (and even if it did, no speaker actually KNOWS all the words and their definitions).
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. 

That is entirely unclear.

>Vocabulary assimilation is unavoidable
Vocabulary assimilation into new languages can and does follow rules. If the rules are clear and simple, people will tend to follow them. This is one reason why I oppose making many Type IV fu'ivla until the language is well-established. When people assimilate vocabulary, they should habitually assimilate it as Type III, which rules are very easy to follow 

> and you can't possibly expect every native speaker of lojban

to know which new brivla will create an ambiguity,
Well, very young kids might not, but adult speakers should be able to manage Type III fu'ivla borrowing 

> so native lojban
speakers would naturally start to incorporate words from other languages in their vocabulary, 

As long as they do so using Type I-III borrowing, problems are unlikely.

> those words would inevitably create ambiguities,

Obviously, I disagree.
There may be the occasional erroneous creation, but errors can be corrected. "Refudiate" has not yet become a standard English word. 


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. 

It isn't, so that isn't the reason.
It is MORE logical and MORE unambiguous in certain ways, and MORE culturally neutral as well. It is also easier to learn than any natlang. 


2) lojban is made the world's official common language.
Ain't gonna happen. I'd be happy with it having significant official use, and UNofficial lingua franca status for informal communication 


3) People use lojban every day to talk to each other.


That would be nice.
4) As was the case with Esperanto, this eventually results in people having lojban as their native language, 

That part will happen
> who proceed to use lojban as their main language for everyday communication.
My understanding is that the bulk of native Esperantists are multilingual and do NOT use Esperanto as their "main language" 


5) This makes lojban evolve.
Languages do evolve. The nature and rules for such evolution aren't really known, and have not been much studied in the case of artificial languages
6) After a couple of decades, lojban is no longer unambiguous
It already isn't. It has never been more than morphologically and syntactically unambiguous. 


nor completely logical
Lojban has never been "completely logical" and never tried to be. It, however, arguably ENABLES many forms of "completely logical" speech if such is desired.
and as time goes by is more and more like languages which have naturally evolved among humans.
This is a prediction which has no scientific basis. No one could possibly know how Lojban would evolve as a quasi-native language.
Wait, so what was the initial reason to use lojban as the world's official common language? 

Not  what you started with.

> After all, lojban's unambiguity and logicality

seems to be one of the main arguments for that,
One of the arguments - but probably not the main one except in certain domains. Cultural neutrality and simplicity and completeness of specification all rate quite highly as arguments.
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.
"not long"? is unsupported by any research. Languages do evolve, but they evolve slowly. People do still understand Shakespeare after 400+ years. 

> 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?
Because there is no such language, and all of the other plausible candidates have greater flaws than merely being "unfinished".
Overall, the argument is that if Lojban cannot be perfect, then it is not only no better than other languages, it is worse than them. 

lojbab

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