On Monday, September 1, 2014 4:07:03 AM UTC-4, la gleki wrote:
> the wikipedia article about lojban might need a short list of
> criticism of lojban with links (e.g. to posts in this mailing list).
> Balanced criticism actually makes languages more popular, so it's
> advisable to make such a
list.
Lojban's greatest success is this:
1. The founders of Lojban set themselves the absolutely overriding goal of creating a version of Loglan that is stable and has a community of users. This goal was achieved.
My main criticisms of Loglan/Lojban are:
2. Even if being a Whorfian experiment -- as Loglan not very credibly purported to be -- were of academic interest, the experiment design was so poor as to render it an utter failure as an experiment.
3. Even relative to the compartively simple task of creating a logical language, Lojban does an exceptionally poor job. There are no formal rules that map a sentence's phonological form to its logical form, and to a large but very slowly diminishing extent there are no informal rules that do that either. There are ways to unambiguously encode
logical forms in Lojban sentences, but these are clunky, verbose and unergonomic (and therefore largely unused); and anybody giving the problem twenty minutes' thought could have come up with a better design than Lojban's.
4. The morphosyntax of Lojban is full of unnecessary baroque complexity -- the proliferations of allomorphy, word-classes, constructions, function words could also be very drastically simplified.
5. Goal (1) is not a very interesting goal: having a stable language with a community of users is interesting only if the language itself is worthy of being a stable language with a community of users. Criticisms (2) and, in my view, particularly (3) and (4) mean the language itself isn't worthy of being a stable language with a community of users. That is, there are no reasons why it is a Good Thing to learn and use Lojban; any attempt to persuade people otherwise would in my
view by deluded or dishonest. (A "Good Thing" is something more than just "whatever floats your boat".)
I've written at length about (3) and (4) elsewhere, on Lojban and Conlang lists.
--And.