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To: <lojban@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: RE: [lojban] RE: Rabbity Sand-Laugher
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 18:17:49 +0100
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From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com>

pc:
> <And something does need to happen if Lojban is to grow. Sitting on it and
> using it merely as something to argue about will not get the language to
> go anywhere.>
>
> I couldn't agree more. But producing a pile of crap because of poor planning
> and poor choices seems to me a bad way to get the language off its duff. It
> may be that it will lead the next round of interested people to say "Hey, I
> can do better than that" -- and they may even be right. But it may equally
> or more likely lead them to say "This is a dumb language; look at the crap in
it!."

My hunch is that newcomers will be impressed by the quantity rather than the
quality of translation, and will naively assume that the translations are
noncrap. So marketingwise, the more the better.

Mind you, because almost all of the admittedly tiny amount of Lojban text that
I read either is incomprehensible or fails to say what was intended, I think
your regular carping about these matters does the community a service: on the
one hand it is good that people want to grow Lojban through abundant usage,
and on the other hand it is good that you deflate any complacency by pointing
out the crapness of the abundant usage. Hopefully this will prevent force
of usage from conventionalizing illogicalities.

I should add, btw, that IMO the crapnesses of usage are in many cases due to the
excessive underspecification of Lojban grammar rather than to any crapnesses
of the translator.

--And.