Here's my opinion:You are not fluent in Lojban, based on what you described. And it doesn't matter what the reasons for that are, the fact stays the same. You are right that Lojban might not yet be equipped for every kind of topic you might want to speak about, but this doesn't change the fact that you are not fluent. Needing a long time to describe relatively basic things in a language means that one lacks practice in that area and/or that one hasn't been exposed enough to this context. I would argue that you should be able to express the vast majority of things you need to express using the version of Lojban that exists right now, as long as you know every gismu like the back of your hand (and know all the cmavo and grammar, of course). That is, I believe it's possible to make do with what we have right now, and if one is fluent then one is able to do just that in a fluent fashion.
I'm not sure the bushmen analogy holds. I wouldn't be surprised if the bushmen were in fact able to communicate just fine, the only thing is that they would have to resort to their limited vocabulary, but they would be able to describe things anyway. They might call skyscrapers "heaven houses" or whatever, and the cars "magic horses" or whatnot, but they *would* be able to express themselves fluently.
This doesn't mean that it's purely a short-coming on your part; it's just the way things are at the moment and as the language matures, we mature with it.
Am 14.02.2012 19:48, schrieb Robin Lee Powell:
(This sort of dovetails with the earlier thread about how "lock two
people in a room and present them with two-person puzzles of various
complexity" as a way of producing somewhat "objective" fluency
tests)
OK, so people keep asking me if I'm fluent.
When I ask people what they mean by fluent, they usually say
something that boils down to "you can say whatever you need to say".
So, let me give you an example of why that metric *simply doesn't
work* in the case of Lojban.
The other day RJ was watching basketball, and I was playing with one
of the babies, and she was, surprisingly, avidly watching the TV.
Having nothing better to do, I decided to explain basketball to her,
in minimal detail.
This took me the better part of 10 minutes, and involved a great
deal of stammering and long pauses.
I could re-do it in a couple of minutes of smooth Lojban.
The issue is simple: to the best of my knowledge, *no-one* has
*ever* described or talked about basketball in Lojban before. So I
had to come up with terms for the name of the game itself {ti poi
nanmu cu ci'erkei la julne bolci}, the act of dribbling {bolci minra
gasnu}, the concept of travelling {bajra se cau lo nu [go'i]}, and
making a basket {punji le bolci le julne}.
I think that anyone asking me if I'm fluent that saw that would say
"that was halting and lame; no, you're not", but what if I explained
to them that no-one has ever done that before? That I had to make
everything up as I went along?
The word "fluent" simply doesn't effectively apply in a context
where the language is so under-used that any speaker *regularily*
encounters situations in which no idiom or terminology exists, at
all. It's like putting two bushmen in Time's square, asking them to
describe what they see, and then accusing them of not being fluent
in their native tongue, except with everything.
-Robin
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