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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 02:14:59 -0000

Jorge:
> 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.

That's my understanding too.

> 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...

It's interesting that there is such near-unanimity (among those
who care about design issues) that the morphology is a disaster
and that shorter gismu and no rafsi would have been a much better
solution. It's this sort of thing that leads me to believe that
had the development of Loglan/Lojban been allowed to be driven 
primarily by design issues rather than by the wish to reach a
stable and usable form as quickly as possible, the language 
would nonetheless have tended to progressively stabilize as
the optimal design -- objectively arrived at through the consensus
of rational minds -- was progressively approximated ever more
closely.

--And.