Oh, my! I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted.
I think it's time somebody did that.
I learn (I’ve been away a while) Lojbanists (of some sort or other or maybe all) no longer car about its primary goal, monoparsing, but are concerned to make a viable language out of the scraps.
You might think this is having your priorities upside down, but you can't advertise a language that satisfies appealing property X (in this case, X = monoparsing) while sacrificing its usability.
My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?”
As I've stated in my previous replies in this thread, I think there's none. There are new loglangs out there which deserve more attention and whose setup is way healthier than the current one; not to sound my own horn, but Toaq is one example of this. (The author is currently working on a full linguistic grammar of the language; I'm quite excited for what's to come.) You're welcome to join :)
In the past, all the grotesqueries of Lojban morphology and grammar could be justified as necessary for the Great Goal. But now that that Goal is gone, they merely constitute needless complexities that make learning the language even harder. Stripping away the 47 kinds of commas (and God forbid you should use the wrong one, even though it no longer makes a crucial difference) (’47’ is merely a ridiculously large number, not meant to be accurate) would make the language easier to learn and do that systematically for all the word classes would eventually get to something manageable.
Perhaps ‘making a viable language out of the scraps’ is a vain task to embark on after all — why not start from the ground up?
But there would still be no reason to learn it, because it doesn’t do anything that English (etc.) doesn’t do, nor do it in a novel and revealing way.
I have to disagree somewhat. As much as I bash Lojban for how it's organized and how much the leadership and the ones of kin do to fend off criticism, learning Lojban was a groundbreaking event of my life — it changed the way I thought of phenomena. (Perhaps now is the time for something else than a revolutionary language — perhaps something like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit…). However, languages have goals, and if the only goal a language has is to be a {mencti}-able curiosity, then I agree.
If I counted right, there are at least nine version of Lojban floating around with adherents. The winnowing process is presumably already at work and some of these are close to languages of one grumpy guy in a garret. Some have people in LLG offices (big whoop!). Some have decent sized (say 12) groups here and there. What can any of these offer to newbies or possible converts to get them to join? Nothing, really. So, they will all fade away (the LLG section running on on inertia).
I've proposed calling LLG Lojban ‘Base Lojban’ (cf. last email). However, power corrupts, which is what ultimately leads to what we have now: the ‘community’ running on dirges of internet fame (remember that xkcd strip from 157 years ago?) and some misconceptions that you'd acquire as you read Lojban's (unfulfilled) mission statement. Those who want to unite will unite — I do speak Lojban with a couple of friends. Even though it might not be as much fun as spending time in a large-ish community and doing good deeds there (like translations — something we all like), it's still better than the status quo where people who dare disagree with the one and only dialect are to screw off.
I recommend that all of you take a weekend off and learn toki pona (maybe start Friday night and leave a little time over breakfast on Monday). You will have a new language with a purpose (you can choose from half a dozen at least). And you don’t lose the rights to constantly snipe at tiny infractions by your colinguals and to get into abstruse debate about details of grammar. After all, I am in the middle of it.
I second that proposal (though any other language will do you good — any X such that X is not Lojban, that is).
— Mỉ Hỏashī jí ka.