Re: news from TLI (colored by the Lojban point-of-view)

[Bruce Gilson <EZ-as-pi@CUP.PORTAL.COM>]

The proposal by Lojbab is quite inter-
esting. While I myself could never
conceive of being a part of it (my
facility in Lojban is such that I could
scarcely engage in continuous conversa-
tion for any significant time in it,
even if I had the time to spare) I am
not uninterested in finding out how
successful a project like this could be
-- it is an attempt to create a
Volapuek-only environment that proved
to be the undoing of Volapuek, and by
contrast one of the successes of
Esperanto is that they do manage to
function in Esp'o-only environments,
despite my dislike of that language.
So the ability to pull this off would
mean that Lojban is demonstrating that
it can in a practical sense function
as alanguage.
If enough people do sign on to this
idea to carry it off, I hope that a
report on how successful it proved to
be will be posted onto the net. While
I have some doubts that it can work,
I wish Bob well in his attempt to
advance the language to this state,
because from my point of view it is a
great experiment: Can a language whose
grammatical structure is as unconven-
tional as Lojban really develop a
speaking community?
                        Bruce