Re: lojban evolution

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

> I can't understand how newcomers like Jorge
>& Goran seem to instantly know the language inside out.

IN Goran's case, it may ne because he just uses the language rather than
trying to analyze it all the time. And he seems intent on just being
straightforward and communicative, with result that people don't need to
look for arcanities - just read and understand.

Esperantists seem to communciate, even those without training in Indo-
European languages or semantics.  maybe it is the semantics that gets
in the way of understanding, as people assume things are more complicated
than they really are.

>In what sense is Lojban intended to be "a model of a natural language"?
>You mean it's modelled ON natural language?

No.  Loglan/Lojban was intended as a linguistic experiment - a simplified
language having what were percevined to be the necessary features of
natlangs, with other features optional.  It was presumed that such a
language would exhibit properties of natlangs in many ways, and that
the results of observing usage in Loglan/Lojban would tell us much about
language in general.  The formal definition of the language, would likely
differ from the actual usage, for one thing, and those differences,
and the evolution of the language in general, would tell us a lot in
itself, yet the existence of the prescription, unlike for natlangs, would
enable significant reduction in unknowns in making such analysis.

(Not too well-written, but I have written this more carefully in a file
on Lojban and Linguistics lojling.txt that is probably on the ftp site
and likely on the WWW site.)

lojbab