Re: [stack] Lojban (was: cabbages and kings)

This is barely relevant to concatenative anymore...

John Cowan wrote:
> William Tanksley scripsit:
> > A lot of work has been done with Esperanto and Ido (there are huge
> > communities); on the other hand, "Basic English" is a commonly used
> > standard subset of English that isn't as hard to learn (although it'll
> > be deceptively hard for a native English speaker to write, since it's
> > very much more restricted so that non-native speakers will have an
> > easier time learning it).

> If you mean Ogden's Basic English, it's hopeless as a subset language,
> because its semantics is relentlessly non-compositional: to say "succeed"
> you say "make good" or "do well", but the meanings of "make" and "good",
> or of "do" and "well", have nothing to do with succeeding.

I don't quite understand. Do you mean that Ogden defined idioms for BE
in an attempt to reduce the word-vocabulary? That is very interesting.
It sounds like a serious potential problem: the word-vocabulary is
small, but the idiom-vocabulary might be unmanageably large. Is that the
case? I can't tell from your post.

> See
> http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/06/why-basic-english-doesnt-work.html
> for more details.

Actually, that post has LESS details -- you give more examples, but you
don't explain why these problems are actually inherent to the language
rather than just problems with the examples you chose. Anyone can choose
bad examples and make a language look bad.

I'm not saying you're wrong (nor malicious); I'm just saying that I
don't understand your explanation.

> There are less drastically impaired simplified Englishes
> out there, like the Voice of America's Special English: see
> http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/about_special_english.cfm .

Thank you -- interesting. Special English appears to be much better
tested than Basic English; I definitely accept your recommendation on
that basis. A glance through Wikipedia shows other interesting
English-derived standard simplified languages.

I note that Wikipedia has a Special English translation of its own.

-Wm