Subject: Re: [lojban] dai harder (was: If it ain't broke, don't fix it (was: an approa...

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 08:53:13 EDT

In a message dated 6/19/2001 9:42:16 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> ru'a dada'o nabmi fi le zu'o za'o lanli le jbovalsi bau le glibau .i mu'a
> casnu dei co'a le ka dukse pensi zoi zoi. empathy .zoi .i ku'i le de'u
> jbosnu pu tugni stidi le jbosmuni be zo dai .i ju'osai le ba jboka'e ba
> selfarvi pilno zo dai tai la'ede'u ki'u la'ede'u
> 
Gee, too bad xod will miss this, but I think he is right that we get into 
trouble because of discussing Lojban in English. Not that we would do better 
in Lojban. The English problem is the dreadful techinical vocabulary that 
has been a charateristic of Loglan/Lojban since JCB's hideous "metaphor" 
({tanru}) at least, "empathy," "assertion," and even "proposition" are now 
causing problems. As for doing better in Lojban, have you read the Lojban 
messages lately. They are like the old messages for your Captain Midnight 
decoder ring: they take a long time to decode and then turn out to be utterly 
banal, So much effort goes into getting it into Lojban that there is little 
left for having something to say. I urge people to keep them up, of course, 
since they can't get better until they come easily. But for serious work, 
we'd better stick to a language we can think in. (Another problem with 
Lojban discussions is that, since there is no Lojban culture but the 
language, we have no other topics to discuss and yet the language has nothing 
to build upon for real cases to test the discussion. It's a vicious circle 
and it is harder to build the culture that the language skills.)