[stack] Lojban (was: Advantages of cat, joy ..?)

William Tanksley scripsit:

> I have to admit -- as someone pointed out --

That would be me: author of _The Complete Lojban Language_ and coeditor
of _What Is Lojban?_  I never learned much Lojban vocabulary, but at
one time I understood Lojban grammar better than anyone else,
despite not being a designer or non-trivial user of Lojban myself.

> that my conclusion was ill-supported (although possible). A better
> conclusion would be that although Lojban was designed to be highly
> learnable, usable, and unambiguous, in practice it hasn't been.

Unambiguity was (and remains) an explicit design point.  Fluency is
a much higher bar than learnability and usability.  People can and
have learned Lojban in the way that people learn programming language,
but being able to use it to express all your thoughts _in real time_,
as in conversation, is a lot more like passing the Turing test.

As it is, there are Lojban-only blogs, a Lojban-only mailing list, and
a Lojban-only IRC channel, and there have been quite a few Lojban-only
telephone calls.  But you can't live your life nor do business nor get
an education through the medium of Lojban, and until at least some of
that becomes possible, fluency is probably unattainable.  (There have
been formal Lojban classes with instructors in the past; I think almost
all learners are self-learners now.)

> One possible reason for this is that the designer didn't know enough
> about the problems to be able to do the design work.

True, although there wasn't a single designer for everything, but an
evolving design tradition.  Loglan/Lojban, like Lisp and Fortran, goes
back to the 1950s.

> The reason that this explanation seems possible to me is that the
> designer wasn't a linguist, 

Hoo boy, you're not kidding.  James Cooke Brown was a games designer.
He understood formal logic fairly well, but his grasp of linguistics
was perilously close to zero.  A lot has been improved since then.

> and even modern linguists and cognitive
> scientists don't generally claim to know enough to achieve Lojban's
> goals. 

True again.

-- 
John Cowan    http://ccil.org/~cowan  [email protected]
'Tis the Linux rebellion / Let coders take their place,
The Linux-nationale / Shall Microsoft outpace,
We can write better programs / Our CPUs won't stall,
So raise the penguin banner of / The Linux-nationale.  --Greg Baker