Lojban/Loglan

["61510::GILSON" <cbmvax!uunet!CCF1.NRL.NAVY.MIL!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!gilson!61510.decnet>]

Lojban (in a letter to me and not on the list) writes:

(of Institute Loglan and Lojban)

>I do not feel that the two languages are different.  I of course don't
>accept that JCB's version is a language since no one speaks it, but in addition
>the language are very close in structure.

If I changed every gismu in Lojban and every structural word, keeping all the
syntactical rules unchanged, would it be the same language? The structures would
in this case be identical, of course. If someone compares such words as
"mreni" and "nanmu" and realizes that they are the 1960 Loglan and Lojban words
for "man," and similarly for all the others, then notes that Lojban "klama" does
not exactly equal 1960 Loglan "kamla" (the former means "comes/goes" while the
latter means "comes" only), it would seem that 1960 Loglan and Lojban differ by
far more than Spanish and Portuguese, where most words in one at least resemble
the corresponding words in the other.

                                                             Bruce