Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Meaningless talk

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 21:53:11 EST

In a message dated 3/1/2001 6:11:46 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> >.i su'a nandu fa le za'i traji ke smuni kakne sepi'o la lojban
> 
> i ie li'a i ma'a za'o na certu le bangu
> 
Not that I can take my own advice, but, after slogging through this thread 
today, even with considerable mechanical help (the MSDOS jbofihe just can't 
take it but the accompanying glosser is very handy), I would recommend that 
we all (or most of us anyhow) go back to "See Spot run" and work our way up 
very slowly before
we get around to doing to philosophical or linguistic discussions in Lojban. 
There was scarcely a line in all this free from grammatical or intentional or 
vocabulary errors, which makes it very hard to read -- especially if you miss 
one of the intentional errors and so get off on the wrong notion of what was 
meant or guess the wrong correction for a word. Lojban has almost zip 
redundancy, so each little error adds incrementally to a total mess. 
>From my point of view -- but that is about my vocabulary and my own writing 
style -- a good move would be to drop all the attitudinals and discursives 
for a while. They do clutter the message and they seem to get misused more 
often that content words (and are also the tightest piece of the vocabulary, 
small error make huge differences). They are semantic ciphers, so nothing 
will be lost (and some folk may be forced to actually use the brivla that 
they mean when they use them). Oh, throw in the non-spatiotemporal tenses 
and most of the connectives while you're about it.
And put in subjects, the absence of which can create a monstrous boggle a few 
lines later.