Re: The design of Lojban

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Andrew Sieber wrote:
> seen any reason to change that assumption.  However, I'm throwing this
> out as food for thought, and am curious if anybody thinks/knows that my
> assumption is false.

I think some of Lojban's "improvements" amount to artificial barriers.
For example the fact that sumti raising has to be marked, bars something
so common and universal that it's hard to even explain what sumti-raising
*is*.  I think this *is* an improvement and will lead to clearer thinking
-- it's a barrier that cuts off a messy shortcut.  But a very very common,
natural, human one.

(for anyone who hasn't read that part of the refgram yet: in Lojban there
are some places that require an abstraction, and you're not allowed to put
a simple sumti in it's place.  For example, the x1 of {rinka}, which means
"cause", requires an abstraction: "the fact that you kicked me *causes* me
to be angry".  You can't use the same word {rinka} to say "you *cause* me
to be angry".  You can mark the sumti with the sumti-raising word {tu'a},
i.e. "tu'a-you *cause* me to be angry"; Or you could use a different verb,
like {gasnu}, which takes a person as the x1 (and *not* an event).)

> However, how are we ever to convince the Eskimos of Greenland to learn
> Lojban?  They use base 20.

I think plenty of concepts in Lojban will be more difficult for them than
switching number bases -- see my comments on sumti-raising above, which
probably apply to all natlangs (I'm making this up -- anyone know for
sure?).  And learning base 10 won't be a useless skill -- they'll need it
to order the reference grammar, since the Lojban Central is currently only
accepting currencies denominated in base 10.

> anyway:  why not simply use the symbol h as being synonymous with the
> symbol ' and thus type comfortably using an unmodified Dvorak keyboard?

For that matter, why not invent an alternative English spelling where "k"
is used to represent what used to be "t", and so on, so a qwerty typist
could type alt-spelled English as fast as a Dvorak typist could type
traditional English?  The new spelling for "The" would be "Kjd".  Thus all
the benefits of more logical keyboard layout, without needing special
software or retraining of typists.  Of course we'd all need to learn the
new spelling...

co'o mi'e kris