An interesting (though slightly absurd) proposition. Bringing toki pona in just stresses the absurd side. Lojban has ten times the vocabulary of tp, just counting gismu straight, forty times taking in the permutation of places, and Lord knows how many times once cmavo and constructed forms come in. Yet tp is spoken (at least written) much more frequently per capita than Lojban and usually within the first week of exposure. Factors in its favor are clearly the small vocabulary, mostly immediate usable for common things, and a small, easy grammar. The whole vocabulary can be absorbed more or less at one go but is, in fact, fed in small doses (a dozen words a lesson, more or less). The corresponding claim holds for the grammar. By contrast,
Lojban vocabulary is typically dumped at once, all 1500 gismu, with no significant lesson separation (largely because there are no really significant lesson books at all) and the same applies to the grammar. It is pretty easy to check that a tp utterance is grammatical and that what you meant to say is at least one of the things you did say. With Lojban, neither of these is simple and many are open to debate even after a formal parser has done its damnedest. Indeed, this uncertainty was, in my experience, the main reason for not using Lojban; not only was it difficult to speak with confidence checking on the fly, but even after due diligence one could not be confident one had said what one intended.
All that being said, there are gaps in the vocabularies of both languages and, while Lojban has means to fill those gaps eventually, tp does not officially (but some word creep is already in evidence). And both are unZipfy and getting worse. Thirty some years ago, the creation of rafsi (not then so called) was considered a great advance for Loglan, in that it reqularized compound words (which were previous thrown together any which way and usually ending up looking like gismu, e.g. -- one of JCB's own -- {bedgo} from iirc {betsu gotso}) and made interpretation much more nearly possible (up to the usual vagueness of tanru). But, of course, many very common notions in areas Loglanists (and now Lobanists) were likely to talk about involved long
compounds. Nothing has been done about this to speak of and what little has been suggested (mainly various sort of acronymization, whether of the strict DARE sort or the freer Gestapo /Ogpu /kenken) are organized to preserve the transparency that the earlier Great Morphological Revolution introduced, but rather are returns to the status quo ante, Short of the LoCCan3 solution (scrap the structure of Lojban, take the statistics, and build from scratch -- dropping the common languages bases in favor of neatly distributed forms and a list of common concepts discovered in actual usage), some transparent system of abbreviations seems the best hope.
Btw, the absence of idioms is an effect, not a cause of lack of chat (or, at best, arises with it): it is hard to have a fac,on de pareler without a lot of parler.
On Sunday, October 26, 2014 1:37 PM, Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com> wrote: