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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 11:54:30 EST

In a message dated 11/29/2001 8:20:32 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> 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.
> 

This contains a remarkably silly clause. Loglan at least was driven almost 
entirely by design issues -- though not perhaps the ones that drive its c
ritics (whatever those issues may be -- they still remain unexplicated) and 
(despite considerable pressure from within) never really got around to 
stabilized form in the first 30 years (clearly not as quickly as possible). 
The most "disharmonizing" change (from the critics' point of view, 
apparently) actually came almost at the end of this period: the introduction 
of regular rafsi. Before then the tendecy was to create new words in 
essentially gismu form -- or as close as possible -- out of fragments of 
gismu chosen aesthetically (for want of a better word, like 
"higgledy-piggledy"). Who can forget the immortal {ai mi bedgo) from 
Troika, a collapse of {betpu gotso} the Loglan of {ckana klama}, "go to bed" 
(all items from memory, subject to the usual waivers)? At which point, the 
rafsi had to be fit to the gismu as best as could be, since the gismu were 
firmly tucked into too many skulls to tinker with. Lojban started gismu 
development with rafsi in mind, so that the fit is much better, about as good 
as could be hoped for given the other parameters of the project. Of these, 
only the derivation factor seems at all negotiable, since its purpose, easy 
learning, has not proven itself in the field (subjectively most people report 
little help from the connections -- but this is almost entirely from English 
speakers, others would be useful to hear from -- and the very limited test 
that was run by someone somewhen -- again just for English -- suggested that 
the connected words were not easier to learn than randomly constructed words 
(does anyone remember details of this test? could someone repeat it?)). So a 
gismu construction system that focused on rafsi and that perhaps met some 
other criteria than derivation from the base languages (visions of semantic 
primes ala AUI dance in my head! or at least final vowels signifying place 
structure) is about as far from Loglan/Lojban as seems possible while 
retaining all the desirable things they offer. Good luck to you. Drops a 
line if you get it to work.