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RE: [engelang] Re: Engelangs - A Design Goal Catalog



John Cowan:
> maikxlx scripsit:
> 
> > I don't dispute your point that Lojban is quite rich in devices 
> > that allow a speaker to be as precise as he likes, but I also
> > can't shake the belief that semantic precision was regarded as
> > a low priority, at least relative to syntactic non-ambiguity
> > and brevity.  
> 
> We felt it important to have the *capability* to be precise,
> but important also not to require it.  A major goal of Lojban,
> which you don't mention in your list, is flexibility.

And brevity was not in fact a significant goal, except as manifest
in the gospel of zipfeanism (a somewhat confused notion specific
to Lojban culture, but based on the idea that word length should
be inversely proportional to word frequency).

--And.