Subject: Re: [lojban] META : Who is everyone (and what are they saying)

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 18:21:43 -0400

At 04:46 PM 9/20/01 -0400, Rob Speer wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 12:31:04PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> > >>> "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]> 09/19/01 11:43pm >>>
> > This is quite a radical change. Some of those may have been learnt and
> > used already. I doubt that our conservative constituency would stand
> > for it.
>
>I'd be fascinated to see an instance where "tei...foi" or "lau" were used (in
>actual usage, not discussions of useless cmavo).
>
>However, reading old issues of ju'i lobypli, I saw the issue where all 
>sorts of
>lerfu cmavo were proposed. In fact, someone wanted to set aside an entire
>consonant of cmavo-space for miscellaneous characters or accents!
>
>Where did these people get the idea that spelling bees for, say, French words
>would be held in Lojban? And why did people pay so much attention to making
>Lojban able to describe any conceivable alphabet and none to the subjunctive?

Simple. Lojban is supposed to be able to do anything that can be done in 
natural languages. Every natural language can talk about its own alphabet 
as well as some others, and has ways of spelling in them. Mathematics uses 
symbols in multiple alphabets and we saw lerfu as part of Mex. In 
addition, some languages use acronyms, and while we weren't sure how we 
could make such things work in Lojban, we wanted to have the tools. There 
was also no aversion to pseudo-Lojban names, as seems to be cropping up 
nowadays, and many names incorporate alphabetical characters. Finally, we 
were trying to attract linguists, who talk about IPA and phonology as well 
as grammar and syntax, and again we wanted the tools to deal with whatever 
came up. A lot of what's there was justified by "this might be useful" for 
solving some problems in expressing lerfu alone or in combination with 
other words, without really going to the work necessary to devise usage 
examples. The philosophy was "better to put too much in and let usage 
decide which ways are most useful" rather than put in too little and end up 
with something unusable or spend a lot of time designing what no one saw as 
being a particularly important part of the language, as opposed to a merely 
necessary part.

Meanwhile, no one could define the subjunctive in a way that allowed me to 
see a problem with expressing it with what we already had. Speaking a 
language with a nearly dead subjunctive made it rather hard for a 
nonlinguist like me.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org