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On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 01:18:26AM +0100, And Rosta wrote: > I have the impression that Rex and his fellow collaborators want something > like a blend of English and Chinese, while preserving the virtues of > Lojban. What exactly does that mean? Well, for one thing Lojban has a > lot of obscure complexity that can be dispensed with. For another, > the goal of brevity and terseness is added to the mix -- the telegraphese > "Man bites dog" idiom; this goal was never one of Loglan's. I had the impression that it was going in that direction for a while, but no longer is. The guy who had all the expertise in Mandarin is no longer on the list. Ceqli already has brevity from reducing 2-syllable words to 1. More brevity would require the drastic changes from Lojban grammar that you mention. I really don't think we can make these drastic changes; too much work has gone into the Lojban grammar, which is very good except in a few annoying areas. I see changes like making single words for le + NU, making NIhO and I the same, putting NAI and CAI into UI, fixing the 'kujoi' mess, getting rid of unnecessary parts like separate words for modals, etc. (Of course the words and names for the classes would be different.) > > Though terminators are unnatural, I think the alternative is worse. > > Requiring every place of every predicate would cancel out the > > conciseness that Ceqli has. The other alternative, of course, is for the > > grammar to be ambiguous, in which case I don't think Ceqli would fill > > any particular need. > > This is not the only alternative. A better alternative is to have > a clause-initial particle that tells you which arguments are present > and which order they occur in. This has all sorts of added side > benefits. For one thing, it automatically distinguishes between > 'nouns', 'verbs' and 'clauses': every clause begins with one of > these particles, and within the clause -- "man bite dog", say -- > you know that the 2nd element is the verb because the clause-initial > particle tells you so. So first you diagram the sentence, and then fill it in with the words? (Consider that many sentences may be more complex than 'man bite dog'.) That's horrid. What natural language does that? Realize that any feature resembling this would nullify one of the most significant changes of Ceqli from Lojban, which is that bare predicates combine into compounds. Or would you have another particle for "the next compound is three morphemes long"? And do you really want a conlang designed for the purpose of creating newspaper headlines? > Also, don't underestimate the unnaturalness of terminators. If > something simply doesn't occur in natural language, it is very > likely going to be a very problematic feature except for people > with computer-programmer-like minds. > ... > Erroneously omitted terminators are a frequent problem in Lojban > text. I've seen that, when terminators are required in places that make sense, people don't have a problem using them. They're just like commas, really. It's the bizarre stuff like requiring 'ku' before 'joi', or 'boi' between a number and a letter, that throws people. Those are the minor parts of the grammar that can be fixed. The situations which require terminators like 'ku' and 'kei' should be internalized as rules of grammar with a reasonable amount of practice. Most people would not learn them from 'thinking like a computer programmer' but just from examples. -- ti .rab. spirc.