Subject: Re: [lojban] To clarify...

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 19:32:52

la tinkit cusku di'e

>I think the grammar is
>beautiful and very interesting, but the words themselves are
>unsatisfactory (both in form, and what was chosen to be a gismu).

I have often made the same criticism, especially about the
morphology. The forms of gismu (CCVCV and CVCCV) are nice enough,
but once you get into rafsi, lujvo and fu'ivla, the rules become
so complicated that it's hard to believe this is a constructed
language we're talking about. The reason we got to this state,
as I understand it, is that the pioneers became so enamoured of
the gismu forms that everything else, which was added later, had
to be fixed so as to leave the gismu untouched, which means that
all of the ugly patches were more or less forced.

In any case, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you
look at it, there is already a language community big enough that
changing any of that is nearly out of the question. In my case,
the beautiful and interesting grammar more than compensates for
the distasteful morphology, so I put up with the latter and enjoy
the former. You have to be prepared to compromise on perfection
if you want a real language...

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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