Re: [lojban] Re: lojban and PR

Now, wait a minute. No one said that you shouldn't "missionize lojban around the world". I would love to have more lojban users. But the point is that lojban (and Loglan) were never intended to be an IAL. That's not just what they're about. The fact that the vocabulary and gammar are equally hard or easy to learn by everyone, no matter what their natural language background, is a minor part of the design, not its major focus. We aren't out to bring peace and brotherhood among all mankind. That's Esperanto's goal. If you want a global language, though, there already exists one: http://snipurl.com/2dj87f The point about English (or Globish) is that the amount of it that's truly "English" these days is miniscule. It's grammar has been streamlined, its vocabulary is glommed from all over the world, and constantly growing everyday, and it is spoken by almost 2 billion people. I doubt lojban will reach that level (well, until the world population is in the quadriillions, anyway). So missionize away, just be a realist about it. Not everyone will have the success of a Ben-Yehuda (after 125 years, approx. 6 million native speakers of modern Herbew, and another 3 million or so secondary speakers), or even a Zamenhof (after the same amount of time, less than 1000 native speakers of Esperanto and no more than 2 million total).

--gejyspa

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 5:14 AM, Sebastian Fröjd <so.cool.ogi@gmail.com> wrote:

ok,
just to summarize the discussion here.
It seems that none of you think that it's a good idea to missionize lojban around the world right now (even if I would like to do just that here in Sweden when my lojban-skills are better).
Instead you would like to improve the language itself first. Some of you would like to make huge changes (like Muhammed), that would make it a totally different language. I don't see why really, since I think lojban generally has a great grammatical structure. Others (including me) would like to make less significant changes, for example to revise some of the word definitions (especielly to be consistent about name of species, colours, scientifical and metaphysical concepts etc).

Matt Arnold:

"Most of the people who are centrally active in the language do not
want it to become a transnational language. I, for one, see no
benefit, and see a great deal of harm that would do."

ok, I don't agree since I only see advantages with a global language. Not everyone like the fact that english is the dominant language in the world. I think that a lot of people in the world associate english with the language of their oppressors (or at least something negative), not the language of the global civic society.

Also, the english grammar is very unlogical and I myself feel very uncomfortable expressing things in english, since it often doesn't sounds quite right what I'm writing or saying, even if it may be logical and comprehensible.

Anyway, I think it's ok to have different opinions about this. The lojban community has the language as the common platform, and should avoid to make decisions about other things like the socio-cultural usages of the language or political agendas. But that doesn't hinder individual jbopli like myself to view lojban as a potential transnational language.

I agree with Pierre Abbat that some of the discussions here are incomprehensible (hey I don't even speak english as my native language as you probably can see).

But if we're going to improve the language, I still insist that we have to be more organized. Who will remember what has been said in this forum 6 months ago? I think it would be better to have different projects clearly listed on the lojban web site: grammatical-logical projects, projects to make templates for constructing new name of species, terminology in different scientific fields, metaphysical concepts (philosophy, religion, new age etc), definitions of colors etc etc. And to specify how many persons is engaged in each project, the current status and so on. That would be really nice!

mu'o mi'e jongausib

2011/10/25 Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com>

ma'upa

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it just me, or does "making a better lojban" come up every 6 months or so?

Not to derail your thread/enthusiasm NH, but I swear to god, if we had as many people learning lojban as we have trying to redesign it / design loccan, our user base would be huge

On Oct 24, 2011 9:26 AM, "Muhammad Nael" <muhammad.nael@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm being reasonably optimistic thinking it'd take less than 5 years to make a Lojban successor... I'll have a week off in the next few days, so I won't debate the new-vocab issue now...
I never said that current users should switch, only that they should work on a better platform for possible near-future adherents.

I study linguistics as a hobby, but I can't agree or disagree with the specific issue you cited. In any case, Lojban-2, Loccan-3, Loghnat,... etc should be built in a pyramid model taking into account all the points ye have raised countless times in which I've no doubt; ie. there should be simpler 'layers' of the same language that wouldn't need the learner to know the language perfectly before he can use it minimally!

I may not have made my point very clear; I apologize but I'm very busy today.

Regards,

MN

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