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At 08:33 PM 6/1/03 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> But the naturalism/formalism issue is > related to that: it isn't orthogonal (since naturalism is inherently > anti-baseline, I don't know about that. Lojbab as a conservative naturalist seemed to see the baseline as a common jumping-off point for naturalistic evolution.
Yes. BUT I expected that there would be 5 years of baseline compliance before there would be any jumping off, and the jumping off would take place by Lojbanists speaking Lojban, not talking about it in English.
Everything I've ever said negative about Jorge's (and others') deviations from the baseline would have to be withdrawn, if they occurred after 5 years of everyone's best efforts at baseline compliance.
> and > pro-yetanotherstupidIALstyleconlangwithnothinguniqueorinteresting, i.e > anti-thewholepurposeofthelanguage, and formalism inherently requires > a language proscription which is non-negotiable (though a formalist > may disagree about what exactly should constitute that proscription > as compared to the current proscription)) Formalists agree on the importance of the baseline, but not on the importance of it being frozen.
This makes sense.
> > What might be true is that people tend to get interested in Lojban > > either because they're interested in whorfianism or because they're > > interested in formalism > > Yeah, but we all know whorfianism (not xod's religion; I mean the > Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) is bunk. I think Lojbanists should drop > all this "testing the sapir-whorf hypothesis" crap, or at least > footnote it with "A largely untenable, racist viewpoint, which is > more or less demonstratably false" I have of course said similar things (albeit a little less vehemently). But the founding intent of Lojban was to complete the Loglan project, and the original purpose of the Loglan project was ostensibly to test SW. So you're saying that Lojban should alter its avowed goals -- that is, change what it says its goals are.
If SWH were demonstrably false, there would be no issue. In point of fact, while I haven't read recent developments, Kempton and Kay had pretty much demonstrated that it was TRUE several years ago, at least within the domain of color words and conception.
I certainly don't think it is either "demonstrably false" or "racist" in the form which JCB and I characterized it.
I still hope to someday test the SWH using Lojban, just as I hope to someday test the meaningfulness of the wordmaking algorithm, which people have dismissed without ANYONE doing any statistical analysis of LogFlash results or any other quasi-objective test.
Anyway, this aside, there seems to me to be a marked discrepancy between the numbers of people who have an interest in Lojban -- even quite an active interest -- and the much smaller number of people who delve into its formal aspects. I don't really comprehend why the many members of the larger group who don't belong to the smaller are so interested in Lojban, though their interest is very real and not at all superficial.
If one reads JCB's introduction to Loglan 1 (which can be read on the TLI website), he summarizes many reasons for being interested in Loglan/(Lojban). I recapitulated these in, I think it was, JL6, and for a long time people were tolerant of the plurality of objectives for the language. Perhaps people need to look over these reasons. Nora, for example, has always been interested in Loglan/Lojban merely as "a linguistic toy", as JCB describes it.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org