Oh, my! I merely meant to drop a friendly reminder that Lojban could not achieve its goal as presently constituted. 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.
Do you have evidence that the Lojbanist community as a whole has abandoned the goal of "monoparsing" (which I take to mean self-segregating morphology and unambiguous grammar)? There may be a couple people who feel it's unimportant, but in my experience, if you leave out a {ku}, you *will* be corrected. As far as I am aware, *all* of the experimental parsers and *all* of the major reform proposals, e.g. as Solpahi's connective reform, honor monoparsing (they simply rely on >1 lookahead). I am not sure why you believe that Lojbanists no longer care about monoparsing. The opposite is true, as far as I can tell.
As far as your words "[Lojban's] primary goal, monoparsing" -- that's to me like saying "a house's primary goal, having a stable foundation". In my view, the primary goal of a logical language is to have a formal semantics, and a formal grammar is a requirement for that, just as the primary goal of a house is to be lived in, and having a stable foundation is a requirement for that.
My immediate question is, “Given that Lojban no longer strives for monparsing, what reason is there to continue working on it or learning it?” 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. 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.
Let's be honest. Rex May showed in the 1980s that the unambiguous morphology could be made not only simpler but *extremely* simpler, and both the makers of Xorban and the grossly underrated Richard Morneau showed that the unambiguous grammar could be made not only simpler but *extremely* simpler. Lojban is based on a rather clumsy (though original and interesting and exciting in 1960) prototype clumsily complexified by decades of patches upon patches. I guess people stick with it because it has something the other languages do not have (namely a history and a community), though that may eventually change. Already Toaq has an active user community and I predict other languages will be coming online in the next few years. But I also predict the Lojban community will continue to exist.
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 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 will not be jumping on the Toki Pona parlor-game bandwagon any time soon. Toki Pona is ridiculously overhyped and grossly overrated in my opinion, is full of its own problems, is a total joke and cop-out in terms of usability ("just don't have words!" -- wow, brilliant idea, Sonya; that solves everything), and certainly does not represent a satisfactory language for those of us seeking a better logical language.
-Mike