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selpa'i, On 30/09/2012 14:50:
I'm not sure it's a good idea to have tense markers at all in Xorban.
I guess, Selpa'i, that you haven't read the whole thread? I can't see how, if you'd read my contributions, you could be writing your message. You write as if you were challenging a consensus that there should be unary operators expressing tense.
Big parts of Xorban are already heading towards in the direction of Lojban,
Which parts? Okay, Xorban doesn't have many parts, so even small parts are relatively big, but I can only think of two. One is the meaning of l-, which is following not the influence of Lojban but rather the influence of Jorge and more distantly me. The other is the phonology, which firstly there is no consensus on and secondly is rather peripheral to the central programme of a loglang.
which some here like to call a failed attempt at a loglang,
I don't think anyone here likes to call it that. It certainly does not succeed in being an adequate loglang, but it wasn't really ever an attempt at a loglang, certainly not a wholehearted one.
I'm not seeing any advantages that Xorban has over Lojban, nor any clear differences if you keep doing this. You either have to admit that Lojban isn't as messed up as you say, or that you are unable to create something better yourself. How is Xorban any better than Lojban? I'm not at all opposed to Xorban, but I see fewer and fewer differences between it and Lojban as the development of Xorban progresses.
I honestly think only someone foolish or ignorant could think that creating a better loglang than Lojban is not trivially easy. You just put phonological form to a Polish or Reverse-Polish version of predicate logic notation. Doing better than Lojban is really not a meaningful benchmark. I've enumerated the faults of Lojban qua loglang so many times that I can't really muster the energy to recapitulate. It's full of gratuitous and useless complexity, needlessly suboptimal designs; it is extremely verbose, able to avoid verbosity only by not encoding important information; its so-called grammar is a work of utter fatuousness, only exacerbated by it being labelled a 'grammar'; it has no coherent, comprehensive and codified rules for defining correspondences between phonological forms and logical forms, and to the extent that some conventions have emerged to try to compensate for that lack, this has been achieved by Jorge's brilliance and perseverance in the face of dogged opposition from the mainstream community and its leadership. Pretty much everybody in the Lojban community has always been very clever -- the language is not at all the product of human idiocy. There are three main reasons why it falls so short as a loglang. The first is that it wasn't fundam entally and wholeheartedly designed to be a loglang. The second is that because of the accumulation of experience, the growth of knowledge, and the internet, we nowadays know much more than we formerly did. The third is that at its very founding, Lojban was pledged not to reform Loglan and not to change; its very mission statement in effect pledged itself to forswear any way in which its design could be improved. To consider Lojban as a loglang is to do it and its creators an injustice. --And.