Re: [lojban] criticism of lojban needed

["'Wuzzy' via lojban" <lojban@googlegroups.com>]

My personal (!) criticism on Lojban:

MAIN CONCERNS:
Concerning the CLL:
- The morphology is only vaguely defined, and it shows thanks to
  various disputes about wheather some word X is correct Lojban.
- The morphology is not formalized at all. It is not part of the YACC
  or any other grammar; the YACC ends at the word level.
- The alphabet is not formalized. The CLL assumes from the
  reader to know of the latin alphabet (which is arguably
  the case if you can read the CLL, as the CLL is only in English now.
  But what if it gets translated into, let’s say, Japanese?)
- The alphabet is only briefly defined, and somewhat clumsily. The list
  of letters is lacking the capital letters, although those are used in
  Lojban.

Lojban itself:
- Lojban is actually not really a finished language:
	- See CLL criticism
	- There are still no dictionary-quality definitions for all
	  structure words (cmavo). I think this is a task that should
	  really get done at some day.
	- The vocabulary is still rather small in my opinion and there
	  is still no published dictionary. I recognize that jbovlaste
	  <http://jbovlaste.lojban.org/> is the de facto dictionary
	  and that it grows every day, and I think it is a great tool.
	  But still Lojban’s vocabulary needs to be much larger. I
	  personally help on this task occassionally.

MINOR CONCERNS:
Concerning the semantics:
- Operator precedence is completely undefined, intentionally . I
  recognize the justification for it, but the CLL leaves us again in
  the dark how to negotiate an accepted operator precedence then.

Concerning answers to questions:
- An answer to a “mo” question (for example: “do mo prenu” = (roughly)
  “What kind of person are you?”) is allowed to consist of just a single
  predicate word (brivla), for example: “gleki”. But what if the
  answerer did mean “gleki” as an independent assertion, NOT as an
  answer to a previous question? So the example sentence “gleki” could
  mean “I am a happy person” (as answer to the question) OR “Someone is
  happy about something” (as an independent sentence which is
  unrelated to the question).
- Even worse, there is not even a structure word to mark a sentence
  explicitly as an answer or a non-answer.






Disclaimer: I am a Lojbanist myself somehow and I am probably biased as
hell. Nethertheless, I have some criticisms accumulated in the past
months. But please don’t blindly believe what I said above, I may be
wrong on some points.

And besides, I wonder if a mailing list would be an acceptable source
for Wikipedians, especially it it consists mostly of insiders. But on
the other hand I don’t really care about the “image” of Lojban, as long
as people stick to the FACTS.

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