gismu history

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

Lojbab:
> >It's surprising that none of them could better the eventual system.
> >Jorge's idea is clearly superior.  Further, perhaps some of the
> >requirements really were unimportant, or at least not so important that
> >the system had to be as cumbersome and complicated and antimnemonic as
> >it has ended up being.
> Not all that surprising.  Even in 1979, relearning was an issue for JCB
> and other Loglanists who were active.  I don't think they looked too
> hard at approaches that would redesign the gismu.  After all, they were
> already redoing every single lujvo and fu'ivla.
> Arguing about the appropriateness of some of the requirements was
> something we did not consider.
> As for cumbersome and complicated - the current system is a paragon of
> elegance compared to what went before, which had non-unique rafsi, no
> special fu'ivla space, and basically resulted in everyone having to
> memorize all lujvo.

I readily agree that within all the constraints the designers of the
rafsi system were labouring under, the result is near optimal. (That,
though, is not much of a consolation to the people who come to the
language fresh, without having followed it through its development.)

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And