Subject: Re: [lojban] centripetality: subset vs component

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 07:55:47 -0400

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 [email-masked]
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