Subject: Re: lojban as a programming language [was Re: [lojban] Lojban for lay programmers]

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2002 17:46:55

Lee Daniel Crocker:
> > >Novels should be in English. Opera should be in Italian.
> > >Treaties should be in Lojban.
> >
> > English was designed for novels?!
>
>English wasn't "designed" at all--it evolved.

Right, but since your first sentence said that a language should
be used for what it was designed for...

>And the art form
>"novel" evolved with it, and the two are nicely suited to each
>other.

Why shouldn't similar or different art forms evolve with Lojban?

>English is also very handy for humor, poetry (certain
>kinds at least; the Greek vowel-length meter doesn't work, and
>English Haiku area pale imitation of real Japanese ones), and
>many other things.

The human language is very handy for humor, poetry and many
other things. The English manifestation of the human language
is certainly handy for it, but so are all other manifestations,
including Lojban if and when it becomes a fully fledged human
language.

>Here's an exercise for you: translate this Grouch Marx joke
>into Lojban: "Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What
>it was doing in my pajamas I'll never know."

http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/index.php?I%20Shot%20An%20Elephant%20In%20My%20Pyjamas%20Gotcha

>That joke /can't/ be expressed in Lojban. It /relies/ on the
>syntactic ambiguity of English for its humor.

Of course. That doesn't mean that Lojban is incapable of language
jokes, which in turn will be very hard to translate into English.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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