Subject: Re: [lojban] presentation of lojban

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 16:30:19 EST

In a message dated 11/23/2001 1:37:47 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Talking to computers someday (.a'o'ecai), sapir-whorf, total lack of 
> irregularities in the grammar, and attitudinal indicators are the big ones 
> for me. Possibly mention that despite the relative youth of the language, 
> it already has a few hundred speakers with a discernable culture. Also 
> perhaps the fact that it is very good at negation, which you really start 
> to appreciate once you have given it try.
> 
I would add the connection to formal logic and the corresponding clarity and 
precision that is possible (but not required). I would downplay our 
community -- by the time it was 45, Esperanto had several million relatively 
competent speakers and a library of several hundred (perhaps thousand) books; 
even if you put Lojbans age at 10 or so, Esperanto -- with only the 
international snail mail of the end of the 19th century -- had many times our 
number of competent speakers and dozens of books. Of course, Esperanto is a 
pretty simple and uninformative langauge and so SAE as to make learning and 
translation easy for other SAEs.
Come down heavy on what we definitely have: the grammar; and what we offer as 
interesting possibilities: attitudinals, s-w, negations, ...