From robin@Bilkent.EDU.TR Thu Oct 28 06:06:19 1999 X-Digest-Num: 269 Message-ID: <44114.269.1462.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 16:06:19 +0300 From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: lojban vs loglan la maikl. cusku di'e > Someone suggested to me that I learn loglan instead of lojban. > I've read the LLG's account of the split... And I think I understand > the political differences (copyright, etc).. I tend to prefer the > more open spirit that seems to surround lojban. > > But: what is actually the difference? What are the advantages to > learning one over another? Anything you read on this list will be biased! Lojban phonology & morphology seems to be much more systematic than Loglan, and some of the tricky logical problems have been ironed out. More importantly, Lojban has been baselined, so that developments in the language consist of actually exploring the potential of what we have, rather than an endless series of bug-fixes. Any future changes will be the result of a consensus of Lojban speakers. Finally, as far as I know, Lojban is going places and Loglan isn't. This is not to say that it can't - people are always reviving moribund languages, as demonstrated by recent efforts to promote Occidental. "Newer" doesn't always mean "better" (look at Windows '98!), but learning Loglan strikes me as somewhat perverse, like people who prefer vi to emacs. > > And: if the grammars are the same, and just the words are different > (??) ... does that mean a loglan-lojban translation program would be > fairly trivial? AFAIK the grammars are no longer identical, but a translation program would certainly be feasible. OTOH, I don't see that many Loglan texts around to translate, so programming time would probably be more profitably directed towards refining the Lojban->English software that we have. co'o mi'e robin.