Re: [lojban] It's been a long time.

2015-05-08 12:33 GMT+03:00 Spheniscine <spheniscine@gmail.com>:

coi za'u re'u loi jbotadni

Wow, the memories are flooding back. I was part of that old mailing list waaay back when. Checking my email archive it was... 2008? Heh. In that time I had discovered much about myself I didn't know about before, found some new hobbies.

Well, a conversation about philology and linguistics, both natural and constructed, had suddenly reminded me of Lojban; I thought I'd take a peek a what happened when I was gone... and... wow. You guys have really gone up and remodeled the place. "Dot side", the "xorlo" reform, new cmavo like mi'ai, la'oi, etc. (I might still need some of these explained to me), rewriting the language primer... not to mention ongoing talk about reducing logical connectives to a single set, and even possible abolishment of the short rafsi system... I was even surprised at little things like the deprecation of tirxu in favor of tigra.

deprecation where? I'm not aware of any wordlists that say {tirxu} is abandoned.

What you could see are proposals for new words that may have new meanings.

E.g. {tirxu} isn't limited to tigers thus it has a purely Lojbanic range of meanings whereas {tigra} would be bound to tigers only as many languages do (technically this proposal was to deal with the weird situation of still having a gismu for a very close big cat "lion").

Similarly, {mi'ai} was proposed to deal with texts where one cannot decide whether "we" corresponds to {mi'a}, {ma'a}, {mi'o} or something else (take "Pater noster" text). Thus this word among other things can prevent possible rants once this word isn't necessarily polysemous.

After I got over the initial shock though, I found myself agreeing with pretty much all these changes.

I was never very fluent at Lojban, and I'm not sure how much time I have to dedicate to that goal now. But even through all these changes, which I quite appreciate for "cleaning up" a lot of clutter, including stuff I didn't realize was clutter, I still see the elements that attracted me in the first place; the idea of a language with both syntactic and semantic rigor as core ideals, that challenged assumptions about what language could be like.

(Yes, I'm aware that this rigor takes different forms on both cases. The syntactic rigor of Lojban eliminates syntactic ambiguity if used correctly, but eliminating semantic ambiguity is impossible without specifying and tense-marking everything to oblivion. However, semantic rigor, though not perfect [see the ongoing discussion about tarci "star (celestial object)" versus "star (shape)"], means that each word represents one specific Platonic idea/relation, in contrast to English (and other natural languages), where words typically have {Platonic idea/relation + connotational baggage + figurative senses + other Platonic ideas/relations that may have had some tangential relationship with the original idea and figurative senses long ago + unrelated ideas from a completely different word that merged into this word}... as an amateur philologist this can be quite beautiful in its own right. But I also very much liked the idea of a language where one could "say what they mean and mean what they say".)

Anyway, glad to be reacquainted.

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