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

Ivo Doko wrote:
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".
They would not be incorporated into lojban that way. And the forms in which they were incorporated would be valid Lojban words, and would remain valid Lojban words even if better words were made to replace them. 

> 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.
If they are valid S-C words, that is no problem. There wold not be valid Lojban words, and probably would therefore NOT become part of the vocabulary. 

>Same thing would happen with lojban

There is no evidence of this.

- purists
would invent lujvo (or brivla) to replace the direct loanwords in order to leave the language's unambiguity intact,
Loanwords, in proper morphological form, leave the morphological unambiguity intact, and it is not difficult to create such words. 

>but people who don't care

about whether the language is completely unambiguous or not


Probably won't learn the language in the first place.

>(who would,
mind you, make up a great majority of lojban speakers if it did become world's official common language)
No language will "become world's official common language". That is political impossibility. Any international language will only be used by people who are motivated to use the language, and generally those who are so motivated, want to use the language correctly. 

> would not cease to use the loanwords
in place of the new "proper" words and lojban would get screwed up pretty quick.
Lojban is not screwed up by well-formed loan words. It may be aesthetically less pleasing, but it loses no functionality.
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 

NO one will agree to make any language "the world's official common
language", but if they did, there undoubtedly would indeed be some sort of standards committee that would "fascistically" define the international language, and denigrate anything else. That is the way international standardization works. 

> 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.
In which case, the question of "completeness" is irrelevant. If people are happy speaking the language or some approximation thereof, then the "fascistic" standards of completeness and unambiguity will be unimportant to them, just as the rules of every other language are.
But in fact, the evidence of the existing speaker base is that people DO "give a crap" what the committee says in the case of Lojban, enough so, that "xorlo" was "forceably" approved by the committee well ahead of the standard procedure because the community wanted it to be officially endorsed. 

lojbab

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