Re: De-Proposition

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

Markl:
> I no longer play the violin, & that cringe response has become
> a subtle, inner experience: more of a twinge, now, than a cringe.
> But, cringe or twinge, I must tell you that, the more I practice
> using the Lojbanic lujvo & rafsi, the more I feel that same
> response.
> The rest of Lojban seems wonderful.  It may not be ideal, or
> theoretically perfect, but it certainly seems harmonious. Feeling no
> aversion response, I had no strong motivation to change any of the
> rest. But my gut feeling insisted that the rafsi needed fixing.

This is very much how I feel. But baselining has an important
social function: it guarantees that the language will not be forever
changing, so that effort made in learning it will not be wasted.

I can see ways of utterly reforming the morphology that would not
split and splinter the se jbobau community, but I doubt that there
would be sufficient uptake of the reforms for them to be worthwhile.

> I'm no prophet, but I expect that most of the really interesting
> conlangs of the next 30 years or so will probably be based on Lojban,
> or on the Lojban-Loglan tradition.  Maybe a few will grow out of some
> other approach, like trying to integrate Putonghua Chinese with English.
> But, in general, I expect that worthwhile efforts will employ some
> variation of the Lo??an anatomy.

If you read Conlang, you'll see that the loglans have had an impact,
to the extent that the preferred starting point for sketches of
new experimental languages is now predicate logic rather than Latin.

> la and cusku di'e
> > I can understand proposals to tinker with non-baselined stuff, and I
> > can understand descriptions of how lojban should be if we could redo
> > it all over again, but I can't understand proposals to tinker with
> > baselined stuff.
> Fair enough. How would you redo Lojban if we could do it all over again?
> I'm trying now to track the various proposals being made.

I sketched an alternative morphology recently. Other changes, in roughly
decreasing order of magnitude:
* Give the same flexibility in expressions of logical scope as there
  is in expressions of predicate-argument structure.
* Get rid of terminators, or at least make them do something more useful.
* Abolish selmao NU.
* Reform ways plural sumti are handled.
* Scrap the rule whereby the first sumti in the bridi is x2 if it follows
  the selbri.
* Simplify gismu place structures.
* Enrich the anaphora system.
* Abolish all or most of the tense selmao.
* Split PA up into several selmao.

There must be loads of others, but these come to mind now.

---
And