Re: [lojban] Re: criticism of lojban needed

There are other reasons advertised to be interested in Lojban and some of those reasons have a certain legitmacy. The point here is just that, for any reason other than monoparsing, there are other conlangs that answer to that interest and are much less complex than Lojban, so that interest could be pursued more efficiently elsewhere. That is a mere practical point and does not answer to the emotional or aesthetic appeal of Lojban, so the claim is stated a little to broadly (but it was a summary, after all).

I suppose the first objection to your way of dealing with objections is to point out that Lojban's academic (or any other for that matter) goals have never been explicitly spelled out (and, indeed, attempts to do so have been explicitly rejected), so learnability and aesthetic considerations (what would those be, anyhow) may very well be among those goals, even major ones, whatever others might think. However, I will stipulate that one academic goal is orthoparsing -- monoparsing that always gives the right parse. Lojban/Logan is unique among widely discussed conlangs in having this goal (and most alternatives are overtly descended from some phase in L/L history). It claims to have achieved monoparsing but the next step has never been explored or even well-formulated, that the correct parse accurately reflects the intended proposition. Proving that would presumably take the form of an algorithm for converting a parse into a unique formula. Beyond that, it is not clear what to put as goals: SWH is largely defunct (or reduced to the most rivial of claims, about which L/L clearly has nothing to say). With it, both cultural neutrality and improving your thinking go as targets, except in some diffuse way that would apply equally to learning Chinese or differential equations. As for learnability, there has never been an actual test of the claims about the complicated system of primitive terms and the anecdotal evidence is at best a mixed bag (every positive matched with an equal negative). For the rest, the sheer bulk of particles of minutely different meanings (and in a packed word space) bodes ill for ease of learning (the lack of competent text books has also always been a problem). Aesthetics is just too sloppy to be worth talking about; subjective problems are personal and, if someone doesn't like something, he can just avoid it.

On Wednesday, September 3, 2014 11:15 AM, "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:

On 9/3/2014 11:44 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban wrote:
> Yup! If your goal isn't monoparsing, you have no reason to be
> interested in Lojban/Loglan. If your goal is monoparsing, Lojan/Loglan
> may be the only living option but its success is not proven and, even if
> it were, it does just about everything in the worst possible way.
>
> Let's see how that line of objections, rather than ones to the
> cosmetics, can be met and turned into a positive discussion of Lojban.

I think that there are a few more reasons, though most of them are not
phrased in academic terms. Certainly, people have BECOME interested in
Lojban for other reasons and have found their interest to be sustained,
even as they learned that Lojban isn't hardly a perfect design.

Objections to Lojban should be separated into critiques of the language
design as a fulfillment of its academic goals, and critiques of the
design pertaining to its learnability and/or aesthetics.

Since the goal is to produce something that can be linked to by a wiki
article, I suggest creating a page in the Lojban wiki that addresses
these criticisms and organizes them in a list (with rebuttals as
appropriate).

lojbab

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