Subject: RE: [lojban] registry of experimental cmavo

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 18:04:03 +0100

Lojbab:
> > > 6. In SE: fill places from x2/x3/x4/x5 onwards with zi'o
> 
> And seems mostly to be asking for short forms of things one can already do 
> in the language. 

"asking for"? as in "wishing for", I hope; not as in "requesting".

> I think that there is little point in bothering to come 
> up with short forms before we see that people are using the long versions 
> for something.

This is idiotic. It is already abundantly clear that given the choice of
(a) saying exactly what one means however longwinded the current resources
of Lojban make it, or (b) saying approximately what one means, but saying
it succinctly and in accord with the style biases built in to the language,
99% of people choose (b).

And this is hardly surprising, since these 99% of people have as their
main goal successful *communication* (i.e. being understood), with a
style as elegant as possible. And since, as we know full well from natlangs, 
it is not necessary to be longwindedly precise (or even, it is necesssary to 
not be longwindedly precise), in order to be understood, longwinded things 
will see no usage because nobody wants to say it badly enough to put up with 
the longwindedness.

Usage is like water: rather than flowing north, south, east or west in the
direction of what the speaker wants to express, it flows downhill in the
direction of the biases built in to the language. For usage to to be driven
primarily by what people want to express, the biases would have to be removed.

Anyway, try not to get me started on this "let usage decide", "thousand
flowers bloom" baloney. I swear I really do try very hard not to express
my views about the policy and not to interfere with the happy lojban
using of the majority. But as you know, I have little interest in (but
not little goodwill for) Lojban usage (or in parole in general) but much 
interest in Lojban design (and in langue in general), and hence I am 
interested in cataloguing hypothetical improvements to the design.

--And.