Re: [lojban] Should I quit learning Lojban?

[Ian Johnson <blindbravado@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 3:11 PM, shanoxilt <osiris_hades_deathland@hotmail.com> wrote:

In fact, almost none of the really complex pieces of Lojban are actually needed and those that are are easily analogized to familiar patterns in English.

But if I'm just going to use Lojban as encoded English, what's the point of learning it?

First, even for Lojban as it exists now, I think that comment was somewhat overstated. The very basics are similar, that's true. Even somewhat more complicated things can be fairly well approximated by straightforward replacements. For example, FA (and the default ordering, as a special case) are essentially verb-specific prepositions, and NU can often be translated as various clause-introducing words like "that" and "to", etc. While English lacks the tools for unambiguous clause separation that Lojban has, only in rather complicated sentences does this tend to be a practical problem. The real problem in my experience, which I had even before learning Lojban, is that sufficiently getting complex English sentences to behave the way you want results in them being intolerably awkward. (That sentence exemplifies itself to a fair extent.) Complex Lojban sentences in my experience "flow" nicer than their English counterparts, especially in writing.

One of the most basic things that isn't nearly as easy to translate by approximate replacement is things involving ka/ni. In particular, {zmadu} and its various counterparts are quite structurally different from their direct English counterparts, and because they take generic bridi rather than just adjectives, they are also more extensible than their counterparts.

mi'e la latro'a mu'o

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