Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla

You asked about gaps and inconsistencies.
Your point is that this is worrying trivia. Point taken and perpetually ignored. Serious problems take too much work.
Yeah, Dothraki (and High Valeryan now and whatever Dave's language on Defiance is) and Klingon and Na'vi are small languages so far (though they all go a long way beyond the scripts - don't forget Hamlet in Klingon), but they have a number of people who are learning (and have learned) themand more join up every day. toki pona is pretty complete; it is just unclear (hence the interest in it) how much you can do with it. So far, no challenges unmet -- but then, no really steep challenges offered either. It is not terribly clear what "full-fledged language" means; the tests that immediately come to mind are ones all the above could meet but Periha~ and dozens of other natural languages could not.
What does "consistent" mean for a language. The 16 rules of Esperanto are a long way from a grammar, but they are used consistently throughout (with the odd rebel here and there, but, hey!, it's a constructed language). There is a certain amount of L1 contamination in most Esperanto, but that tends to level off as indoctrination continues. The spread of Esperanto among the complement of educated Westerners is slow indeed, despite a century plus of evangelism. (The same is true, of course, of Lojban and most other constructed languages -- mainly an eW preoccupation).
Carnap, by the time I had him for classes, was a bit more sensible (or less polite). To be sure, there are any number of ways to build a logic, but in the end it has to conform to the rules of truth and validity. You can build almost any sort of language and eventually work out the rules by which it does in fact conform to this restriction (if it really is that): see a great sweep of modern linguistics since about 1960. But a logical language in the present sense is one in which that conformity is on or discernably close to the surface and *that* limits your options or at least eventually forces moves along the path you have decided to pursue.

From: v4hn <me@v4hn.de>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Monday, June 10, 2013 7:16 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] cmevla as a class of brivla

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 09:38:36AM -0700, John E Clifford wrote:
> anaphoric pronouns, reduplicated connectives, right ends of
> various constructions (to match the intentions, not just fit the rules).
> That'll do for starters and all of them about practical things.

None of these are discussed here, but I get what you mean.

> Whether cmevla are brevla is definitely not in the list;
> it is about saving a handful of lines in a grammar.

That was my point.

> Well, it depends upon what you mean by a real users group.
> I don't know what the figures are for Lojban (nor how they
> might be arrived at) but, at the moment, at least Klingon,
> Dothraki, Na'vi, and toki pona that I know of claim followings
> in the hundreds (again, I have no idea where the numbers come from).

No way, Dothraki is a fully specified and used language? %^D
Ok, sure, why not...

> As for simplicity, assuming there were some objective measure of that,
> I doubt that Lojban would do that well against, say, toki pona,
> even setting aside the problem of learning 10,000 words or so.

I was talking about full-fledged languages. :^D

> Even Esperanto is simpler -- for educated Westerners --
> than Lojban (even including vocab learning).

But less consistant to the best of my knowledge.
And not everybody is an educated Westerner.

> Don't worry about splitting the community; it never was nor ever could be a unity.
> We will go on, squabbling every inch of the way and yet come up
> with a decent language at any given point and any given speaker.

Hehe, good to hear that.

> speaking as a logician, there is a right way,
> or at least several equally right ways, and as a result, a large number of wrong ways.
> None of those are listed above but are high on my personal list.

Wow, I didn't think there are _still_ logicians who don't agree with Carnap on that matter:

> "It is not our business to set up prohibitions, but to arrive at conventions...
> In logic there are no morals. Everyone is at liberty to build up his own logic,
> i.e. his own language, as he wishes. All that is required of him is that,
> if he wishes to discuss it, he must state his methods clearly, and give
> syntactical rules instead of philosophical arguments."
-- The Logical Syntax of Language, §17 (1937)

v4hn