Subject: Re: To clarify...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 04:06:29 -0000

--- In lojban@y..., "And Rosta" <a.rosta@n...> wrote:
> 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.

Very interesting. My initial desire was to keep the morphology but 
redo the gismu, rafsi, and cmavo so the rafsi and cmavo could be 
regularly deduced from the gismu. Now this is sounding much better, 
but unfortunately lojban is sounding more broken :(. I think John 
Cowan mentioned that the morphology isn't even fully debugged, which 
further makes it seem in doubt.