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Am 01.10.2012 01:42, schrieb And Rosta:
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.
I think I have to apologize for misrepresenting the intentions of some of Xorban's contributors and I probably wrote this message in the wrong thread. Upon rereading this thread, I realized that you were agreeing with me. My post was the result of many small things I thought I had noticed in seperate threads which to me seemed like Xorban was introducing loads and loads of new words and constructs which in turn seemed to introduce the same sort of chaos that we find in Lojban. If that is not what is actually happening, I'm glad to know that. Maybe it was just an illusion, which is very possible. =)
Big parts of Xorban are already heading towards in the direction of Lojban,Which parts?
Now that you're asking, I can't remember any details. It was more of a vague sentiment. I will try to tell you once I see one.
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.
Oh no, l- is a must-have for me! Both in Xorban and in Lojban.I'd quit Lojban this very instant if it didn't have l-.
The other is the phonology, which firstly there is no consensus on and secondly is rather peripheral to the central programme of a loglang.
Right, I don't care much about the phonology, though the huge potential number of schwa might be off-putting to me. I also think the roots could be shorter such that every word/root is monosyllabic. But that's up to you (pl) to decide.
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 thought I'd remembered you saying that once. Of course now you're saying that it wasn't ever trying to be a loglang. Which is of course weird given its name, but I don't know enough of early loglan's history.
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.
Maybe. I guess I'm very wrong in finding Xorban not too different from Lojban. I do think gua\spi does better than Lojban in certain regards, for instance in its root word definitions and in how much simpler than Lojban it is. And I think that's why I reacted like that upon seeing all these additional proposals to Xorban, which seemed complete in its simplicity, just like gua\spi, but I might have mistaken mere throwing around ideas for serious proposals. Ah I remember now, one thing I didn't like was how you (pl) decided to implement compounds in Xorban. Having no regularity in them and only using the roots for mnemonic purposes seemed like a cheap solution, and less compositional than I would prefer. If the definitions of the roots were adjusted slightly, a compound system akin to the one used in gua\spi would be much more to my liking, and feels more logical to me. However, I seem to not understand what "logical" even means.
I've enumerated the faults of Lojban qua loglang so many times that I can't really muster the energy to recapitulate.
And I do appreciate that you repeat it once more.
It's full of gratuitous and useless complexity,
Yes.
needlessly suboptimal designs;
Yes.
it is extremely verbose, able to avoid verbosity only by not encoding important information;
Yes and no, I'd say. I wouldn't call it extremely verbose. A Lojban text is almost exactly as long as the same text in English, depending on the subject matter. Most of Lojban's verbosity comes from it's long words and all the additional words that carry no meaning, e.g. terminators (which gua\spi did away with) and a handful of other cmavo, as well as gismu being bisyllabic, which could also have been avoided.
its so-called grammar is a work of utter fatuousness, only exacerbated by it being labelled a 'grammar';
Sure, it allows you to say nonsense. It's not a grammar in the classical linguistics sense. But at the same time, that's what makes Lojban a nice experiment. Somethings might turn out to make sense in the future that now seem nonsensical. I take it you would prefer things that make no sense to be ungrammatical. Isn't that possible in only two ways? Have more selma'o or write a semantic parser. The former is not desirable I think, the latter just hasn't been done yet.
it has no coherent, comprehensive and codified rules for defining correspondences between phonological forms and logical forms,
I'm not sure what this business about phonological forms is about. Would you mind giving an example?
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.
Defintely, no argument here. And I am certain that Lojban will continue to improve in this direction, getting simpler and simpler and removing all those stupid little things you mentioned above. We'll have only one TAG selma'o, cmevla and brivla might merge merge, I'm certainly for it, and using {cu} already, and xorlo will become the standard throughout (there are still a surprising number of people who are opposed to it, but give it some time). I completely agree that the leadership of Lojban is scared of improvements, very much so in fact, but it can't and won't stay that way forever. These conservatives are a dying species, even if you and I won't be around to seeing it happen (though I think it won't take that long).
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 fundamentally and wholeheartedly designed to be a loglang.
=). I'm probably being annoying, but what *is* and what *isn't* a loglang? What are the objective criteria?
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.
That is probably so, but the mission goal doesn't have to become reality. If the Lojbanists of today are aiming for more, nothing is there to stop 'em. You can't really compare the Lojban of the nineties to the Lojban of today. And by today I really mean tomorrow, because some people still haven't made the mental shift. I already live by the rules of the sane and simplified Lojban as much as I can without being too much of an outcast on IRC =). It gets lonely sometimes, but more and more support is forming on the side, so it's not at all a hopeless cause. Again, I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions prematurely and for hijacking the thread with this. Unfortunately, I wasn't around to see the beginnings of Xorban, so I don't even know the motivation behind the current system, in particular the formula + variable idea. It seems a lot like FA tags to me, and the rest is just a simplified Lojban (I'm oversimplifying her). But maybe what I call Lojban is not exactly what you have in mind when you criticize it.
mu'o mi'e la selpa'i -- pilno zo le xu .i lo dei bangu cu se cmene zo lojbo .e nai zo lejbo doị mèlbi mlenì'u .i do càtlu ki'u ma fe la xàmpre ŭu .i do tìnsa càrmi gi'e sìrji se tàrmi .i taị bo pu cìtka lo gràna ku