From lojbab@lojban.org Fri May 12 04:53:40 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 2917 invoked from network); 12 May 2000 11:53:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 12 May 2000 11:53:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO stmpy.cais.net) (205.252.14.63) by mta3 with SMTP; 12 May 2000 11:53:38 -0000 Received: from bob (49.dynamic.cais.com [207.226.56.49]) by stmpy.cais.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id HAA16615; Fri, 12 May 2000 07:52:00 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4.2.2.20000512074837.00ae3c50@127.0.0.1> X-Sender: vir1036/pop.cais.com@127.0.0.1 X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.2.2 Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 07:55:47 -0400 To: PILCH Hartmut Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component Cc: Lojban List In-Reply-To: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" At 08:09 AM 05/12/2000 +0000, PILCH Hartmut wrote: > > > Personally I interpret the spirit of Lojban as accepting modern > > > international standards (meters & kilograms, celsius, utc time, iso > dates, > > > etc) unless a really good reason interferes. > > I do the same. However the possible "good reasons" must be checked > > carefully first. > >You might as well just "accept English as the international standard". >Why bother about creating a neutral language roots of diverse sources? There have been many people who think that is exactly what we should have done. "Anglan" is one of the most frequent reform suggestions that the Lojban project has had to deal with. The two arguments against it are 1) that it is unsuitable to a linguistics experiment that tests cultural independence from language in that English speakers will relate differently to the language (and less independently of their native language culture) than other speakers and hence cannot be used as test subjects in the same kind of test. and 2) that Lojban morphology, which is critical to some aspects of the language design (audio-visual isomorphism) is incompatible with English root structure, and by the time you mangle English roots to fit Lojban's morphology, large numbers of them are not particularly recognizable. Lojban is not designed either to set or follow standards. If we have no reason to make a choice (and following JCBs prior design decisions is one reason that was held important), then we might be better to use an international standard than a national one. But Lojban supports non-metric as well as metric units. lojbab ---- lojbab lojbab@lojban.org Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org