Subject: Re: [lojban] a goodbye of sorts

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 09:14:15 EST

In a message dated 11/13/2001 11:54:57 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> spent a lot of time trying to learn the gismu so i could enjoy 
> reading. and when i managed to get through whole parapgraphs of 
> Alice...it was wonderful! but eventually i got tired of dealing with 
> the irregularities rampant in the language. irregularities are 
> common in all natural languages, but one that is 
> supposedly "designed" should have far fewer than lojban has. look at 
> the jbosnu group...nobody posts there now. it seems people enjoy 
> talking about the language, but not in it. lojban is a second 
> generation language, evolved from loglan. if history repeats and a 
> new language sprouts from lojban, i'd like to be involved in it. i 
> intend to get started on a binary-encoded language, and lojban's 
> design will help greatly with it.
> 

Well, I will rather miss thinkit, while having doubts about the name and even 
greater ones about his hopes. The irregularities he complained about were -- 
so far as I can make out his complaints -- caused by greater regularities, 
which are likely to be carried over to any third generation language which 
would count as being descended from Lojban: decomposable strings, fixed 
patterns for parts of speech, ultimately machine parsible sentences. While 
it might be possible to improve the connections between modals and gismu 
slightly, maybe even without seriously affecting the "learnability quotients" 
(the most likely thing to go, I should think), some irregularities will 
remain and new ones will likely turn up in new places. And, of course, it 
will be possible (even likely, if Lojan's open forum is continued) for 
someone else to devise yet another sense of regularity which even the best 
new version fails, just as Lojban failed the sense (still not very clear) 
that thinkit devised.