Gleki Arxokuna, On 16/09/2014 17:57:
On 9/15/2014 11:14 AM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban wrote:
Personally, though I am perfection-driven, I
have decided that it is a better use of time and talent (a lot of the
one, a little of the other) to work with a nearly completed project in
the hope that it will mange to get completed into a product that is good
enough (does all the crucial things, even if in sloppy, inefficient,
even ugly, ways).
Provided both languages have a formal syntax and a clearly defined
connection between the two dictionaries it won't matter a lot what
language will be spoken since the machine translation will be 100%
precise under such circumstances.
This is not even remotely true. First of all, the formal syntaxes would have to contain logical forms, which a formal syntax indeed should, but hardly any do (and Lojban's doesn't).
Second, the "clearly defined connection" between the dictionaries would work only if for each word in the one language there is a word in the other language that always translates it, and this one-to-one translation is explicitly stated.
The only way this is going to happen is if the two languages are deliberately designed to be intertranslatable.
Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG, On 17/09/2014 15:40:
On 9/16/2014 5:36 PM, TR NS wrote:
If you want to attract people to this language you have to make it
so damn good that people can't help themselves.
I agree with that. But I think nobody yet knows how to make it good enough. More on this when I reply to the Engelang message.
Alas, what some of the tinkerers thing is "so damn good" is anything
but to other people.
Broadly, Lojbanists fall into two groups.
I. Those like, say, me, who know and care about logic and linguistics.
II. Those like, say, you, who don't know and don't care about logic and linguistics.
History has shown a consensus among Group I. If you know and care about logic and linguistics, then you are painfully conscious of Lojban's inadequacies and want a better language. If you don't know and care about logic and linguistics, then change to Lojban seems gratuitous and you want the language to stay the same. The ideas for change coming from Group I seem like tinkering only to those, like you, who don't understand them or the issues involved.
In the population in general, Group II is vastly larger than Group I, but I have never been able to understand why people from Group II are attracted to Lojban in the first place. Therefore I suppose, perhaps wrongly, that most Lojbanists must fall into Group I and want something that actually is a logical language, and therefore support a progressive rather than ultraconservative position.
What will attract people is a body of other people actively using the
language, materials published in the language, possibly including
stuff not otherwise available (original works in Lojban).
People
USING the language, and not arguing about changes to it is what will
make things seem "so damn good". You apparently don't realize how
demoralizing it is to most people to read about yet another suggested
change, and it is a turnoff simply to see changes being the primary
discussion topic on the mailing list. "So damn good" necessarily has
to mean "no one wants to keep tinkering with it".
But what happens -- as with current Lojban -- when people seeking a logical language -- snd ideally one with a speech community -- arrive and find that all those Lojbanists who actually understand the logicolinguistics issues agree that current Lojban is not fit for the purpose of being a logical language? It seems to me that they want the language to get fixed. People arrive and find discussion about change a disillusioning turn-off because it reveals that Lojban advertises itself under false pretences; it is neither complete nor a logical language.
Forking would fix this, allowing people to vote with their feet.
I have looked at those. Any tonal language (IMHO) is doomed from the get
go.
That is probably because you aren't Chinese. And there are a lot more
Chinese than English native speakers.
There are more Chinese speakers than speakers of Basque, too. But, more relevantly, there are more people who don't speak Chinese than people who do.
--And.
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