Lojban In General

Oh hello there,

First of all, let me admit that I don't speak/write lojban yet. I know,
I should, but there's simply no one to talk to, except for the guys on
IRC. There needs to be a reason to speak/write/read/hear lojban, and I
think this is the most important step in spreading it.
So let's recall the German language for a second. It was used
internationally because it was used in science. These days, this is no
longer the case, but German used to be the de facto standard language
for scientific articles. Lojban, with all its properties, would be a
very good language in such an environment, because it further forces you
to form a definition of everything you're talknig about, resulting in
better science. So I think a good way of spreading Lojban would be to
start using it in scientific fields first, and then it'll eventually
either die or spread to other fields (although I hope the latter
happens). How this should be achieved is not yet something I know, but I
guess it starts at enabling "famous" science centers to accept Lojban
texts. For example, arXiv.org should accept Lojban articles (if you got
that down, I guess you're halfway there). Once Lojban is *the* language
used by scientists, I think a natural next step would be to put the
community to work on translating the entire computer field: websites,
wikipedia (!), applications.

So, all in all, focus on making Lojban the language used for science.

I hope you didn't think of this yet, because that would suggest it's not
working. On the other hand, it might take a few years... Well, whatever,
this it what I have to say about spreading such a language (and of
course I'd love to see Lojban spread) and I hope you can do something
with it.

Thanks for your time,
tulcod.

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de'i li 05 pi'e 09 pi'e 2008 la'o fy. Auke Booij .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> I hope you didn't think of this yet, because that would suggest it's not
> working.
.skamyxatra

We've already thought of this, in a way. Most Lojban propaganda emphasises its
potential usefulness for writing scientific & Mathematical papers, and some
other fields, such as law, have also been mentioned as potential benefactors of
the language. However, as far as I can tell, the problem isn't that it's not
working. The problem is that *no one who knows Lojban truly cares about it*.

No one is actually passionate about the language to the point of being willing
to make some great contribution and carry it through to the end. The committee
in charge of ironing out the language recently sent out an e-mail asking for a
taskmaster in the hopes of getting around their "serious lack of momentum."
Almost all of the few original Lojban works attempted have either been very
short or else have been abandoned part of the way through (e.g., {la nicte
cadzu}). The Lojban main page has two news items on it: one from March of this
year and one from May of last year. The most frequently cited excuse for
failure to get around to working on a Lojban project is that it's not high
enough on one's list of priorities. Huge swathes of the tiki are out of date,
and the dictionary may never be completed. The Lojban portion of Wikipedia
(yes, people have been translating it) has 688 pages, 564 of which are "{na
mulno}" (stubs, not complete). Either Lojban attracts people with schizoid
personality disorder, or else the language is simply lacking in any features to
capture people's imagination and keep it captured long enough for them to
spread the joy to others.

I've been holding in that thought for a while. If anyone disagrees, the best
way to disprove me is to do something truly great & labor-intensive for Lojban.

mu'omi'e la'o gy. Minimiscience .gy.

--
do ganai ka'e tcidu dei gi djuno lo dukse

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Then this jumps into my mind: we take:
-1 smartass (ie scientist)
-1 english scientific article
-1 big community who knows a lot about an invented language (guess which
one)
-some time (a month or three)
Then, the smartass is set to learn Lojban and then starts translating
the article. He/she will get thorough help from pro lojban speakers and
eventually a very good side-by-side comparison is made between the two
versions of the article, explaining how Lojban is better for this use
(or maybe not, in which case we'll have to invent a new language :P).
This can be posted online, and people can see how Lojban is better.
Applied comparison of English and Lojban will show to anyone why it is
better, while "advertisements" saying that lojban is simply better will
only make people sceptic. Of course, such an applied comparison doesn't
just need to be given for a scientific article, but can also be applied
to literature (explaining how certain feelings can be explained better
in lojban (right? :P)).

Also, in the open source development world a lot of projects tend to
have a "bug day": a day on which the community helps solving bugs en
masse. Only a few days ago (maybe even today? yesterday?), Ubuntu
admitted its project to fix their wiki documentation (en masse) failed
miserably, but most code fixing projects seem to help (even if it would
just be to 1. have new news 2. get attention to the fact that work needs
to be done). Maybe a similar setup can be made for the lojban community,
where for a certain amount of time per a certain amount of time a
well-prepared and well-organized goal will be tried to be achieved. For
example, translating a short poem. And then a longer poem. And then a
book. A word processor. Two word processors. I'm sure you have plenty of
imagination to think of better projects, but this is just the idea.

Any opinions?

PS: reading up on the characteristics of SPDs, I must admit that I... Oh
nevermind, I don't think you want to know.

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 21:27 +0000, Minimiscience wrote:
> de'i li 05 pi'e 09 pi'e 2008 la'o fy. Auke Booij .fy. cusku zoi skamyxatra.
> > I hope you didn't think of this yet, because that would suggest it's not
> > working.
> .skamyxatra
>
> We've already thought of this, in a way. Most Lojban propaganda emphasises its
> potential usefulness for writing scientific & Mathematical papers, and some
> other fields, such as law, have also been mentioned as potential benefactors of
> the language. However, as far as I can tell, the problem isn't that it's not
> working. The problem is that *no one who knows Lojban truly cares about it*.
>
> No one is actually passionate about the language to the point of being willing
> to make some great contribution and carry it through to the end. The committee
> in charge of ironing out the language recently sent out an e-mail asking for a
> taskmaster in the hopes of getting around their "serious lack of momentum."
> Almost all of the few original Lojban works attempted have either been very
> short or else have been abandoned part of the way through (e.g., {la nicte
> cadzu}). The Lojban main page has two news items on it: one from March of this
> year and one from May of last year. The most frequently cited excuse for
> failure to get around to working on a Lojban project is that it's not high
> enough on one's list of priorities. Huge swathes of the tiki are out of date,
> and the dictionary may never be completed. The Lojban portion of Wikipedia
> (yes, people have been translating it) has 688 pages, 564 of which are "{na
> mulno}" (stubs, not complete). Either Lojban attracts people with schizoid
> personality disorder, or else the language is simply lacking in any features to
> capture people's imagination and keep it captured long enough for them to
> spread the joy to others.
>
> I've been holding in that thought for a while. If anyone disagrees, the best
> way to disprove me is to do something truly great & labor-intensive for Lojban.
>
> mu'omi'e la'o gy. Minimiscience .gy.
>

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On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 15:57, Auke Booij <auke.booij@gmail.com> wrote:
> Lojban, with all its properties, would be a
> very good language in such an environment, because it further forces you
> to form a definition of everything you're talknig about, resulting in
> better science.

As someone who does not speak fluently, or even all that well, but who
has actually studied most of Lojban in depth, I find the idea that
Lojban would have any major advantages for scientific articles to be
dubious. Language is simply not a roadblock in communication in
science, except insofar as there is more than one language in the
world. And while I think Lojban would be a great candidate for an
interlingua, that's really a completely separate argument.

I wonder if you could be more specific about how you see English (or
German) falling down as a language for scientific discourse. How is
science materially harmed by the disadvantages English has compared to
Lojban?

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

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On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 16:27, Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com> wrote:
> Either Lojban attracts people with schizoid
> personality disorder, or else the language is simply lacking in any features to
> capture people's imagination and keep it captured long enough for them to
> spread the joy to others.

Or it's simply unlucky about attracting devoted and fervent fans, or
conlangs are just too esoteric to ever attract a following the size
of, e.g. Python.

The thing that makes Lojban different from some half-finished project
on Sourceforge is that Lojban doesn't lose its relevance over time
nearly as quickly as something that's about software. So Lojban
doesn't need the level of dedication that a software project gets in
order to stay alive. This is not to say that I'm sure that Lojban is
healthy. I think it's probably OK, though a bit slow-moving. And I'm
doing my part.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

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with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

I suggest making/translating blogs, websites, games, and programs into Lojban. Also, people should start subtitling videos into Lojban and do covers/fan-dubs into Lojban. In my opinion, this is the best way to get the average person to know about Lojban. It seems that most Lojbanists are trying to get other linguists to know about Lojban but we should also target the general public, too. Thus, letting much more people know and get interested in Lojban.

On Fri, 2008-09-05 at 18:04 -0500, Chris Capel wrote:
> As someone who does not speak fluently, or even all that well, but who
> has actually studied most of Lojban in depth, I find the idea that
> Lojban would have any major advantages for scientific articles to be
> dubious. Language is simply not a roadblock in communication in
> science, except insofar as there is more than one language in the
> world. And while I think Lojban would be a great candidate for an
> interlingua, that's really a completely separate argument.
>
> I wonder if you could be more specific about how you see English (or
> German) falling down as a language for scientific discourse. How is
> science materially harmed by the disadvantages English has compared to
> Lojban?
>
> Chris Capel

Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical
and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas.
And then they come to strange conclusions.
Trying to write this e-mail, it appears to be hard for me to find good
examples, while I experience inconsistencies in scientific texts every
day. So far, the only thing I can say is that Lojban forces you to
choose your words correctly, and, of course, evades ambiguity (which is
generally not a problem).

On Sun, 2008-09-07 at 10:24 -0700, arpgme wrote:
> Re: How to spread the word
>
> Author: arpgme
>
> I suggest making/translating blogs, websites, games, and programs into
> Lojban. Also, people should start subtitling videos into Lojban and do
> covers/fan-dubs into Lojban. In my opinion, this is the best way to
> get the average person to know about Lojban. It seems that most
> Lojbanists are trying to get other linguists to know about Lojban but
> we should also target the general public, too. Thus, letting much more
> people know and get interested in Lojban.

Ironically, I got to know about Lojban because of an xkcd strip. Since I
tried esperanto a few years back too, I thought it'd be interesting to
see what this "yet another" interlanguage had to offer.
But then again, there's also a lot of people who don't bother learning a
different language. I think a lot of americans are content with English,
sometimes plus one other language (usually spanish). Why would they
suddenly bother learning Lojban? I think we initially need to have
something to offer, something not available in a different language. And
then try to get attention. Esperanto got famous because it pretty much
is spanish with a few modifications, so it was easy for people to learn.
Similarly, Italian looks *a lot* like Latin, hence most people who had
Latin will have few trouble reading Italian. But Lojban is a completely
different language. With a reason. But what reason? That's unknown to
pretty much the entire world minus the handful enlightened ones amongst
us who learned Lojban.

tulcod.

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i am working on my "podcast" project. i am trying to make it easier to learn vocab by listening on the go, and learn grammer facts and stuff you can remember. it has helped me, but i cant say whether anyone else has benefitted.

-seryf

---Original Message---

From: Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com>

To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 5:11 pm
Subject: lojban Re: How to spread the word

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 16:27, Minimiscience <minimiscience@gmail.com> wrote:
> Either Lojban attracts people with schizoid
> personality disorder, or else the language is simply lacking in any features
to
> capture people's imagination and keep it captured long enough for them to
> spread the joy to others.

Or it's simply unlucky about attracting devoted and fervent fans, or
conlangs are just too esoteric to ever attract a following the size
of, e.g. Python.

The thing that makes Lojban different from some half-finished project
on Sourceforge is that Lojban doesn't lose its relevance over time
nearly as quickly as something that's about software. So Lojban
doesn't need the level of dedication that a software project gets in
order to stay alive. This is not to say that I'm sure that Lojban is
healthy. I think it's probably OK, though a bit slow-moving. And I'm
doing my part.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.

On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote:
> Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical
> and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas.
> And then they come to strange conclusions.

This is a very good point in my opinion.
During the last few months, I have starting studying
various works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
and Kant in German, which is my first language.
Quite often, I could not be sure how far
an 'and' ("und") extends, or how many scopes
were terminated by a ','.
Maybe sounding trivial, in descriptions of abstract thought constructs,
the difference often is very important.
Whenever I find such a place, I realize the significance
of grammatical unambiguity.

If I'm not sure about the structure of a bridi,
I can always hand it to the parser.

My impression is, that those thinkers often tried
to help the reader interpret their works - the way
they intended them to be interpreted - by explaining
the same thought several times in other wording.
'Just to make sure the reader gets it right.'
Sure, semantically, doing this may be useful
in lojban too, but I refer to the case of different wordings
so that 'an idea of the thought' helps understanding the
scoping by allowing for exclusion

I am confident lojbanic works are innately capable of achieving
a higher level of denseness, - given the structure of thought
takes the lojbanic features into account.

But it's not only 'denseness' as in shortness. Nowadays,
I think it can be said to be commonly accepted
that good (English) style (educational) is writing in short, simple sentences.
In German, it's often even suggested to read the English (educational) books
instead of the German ones, as they are less cryptic.
Old German (I don't really know about old English or other languages),
however, is something very different. Sentences of more than a page are no
exception. Complex thoughts are not put into several sentences,
but more often than not described as one.

I don't dislike that style, it has it's pros and cons: It certainly
is harder to read, you have to remember (or rather reread)
half a page precisely to understand the other half,
but it also is more perfect in being a description of the underlying
though. The many-short sentence style feels rather like an
introduction into the aspects of the thought to me,
being less coherent/dense.

The less/large-sentence style profits enormously from Lojban,
for grammar is unambiguous. However many sub-sentences
there are, you can always pick out one of them and
study it in isolation first. However cryptic the negation seems,
you can always move it over negation boundaries and see if it's,
more clear this way. (Even if you get the thought, moving the
negation sometimes so drastically changes the appearance
of the thought, that you may have to think it over once more
to understand it fully)

I wonder what Schopenhauer, who tried to create a system of reason,
similar to maths in that statements and thoughts could be proven to be right
or wrong, would have said to Lojban, which offers a seamless unification of
unambiguous (predicate) logic and human language (capable of describing
feelings and properties and putting the world in words).

mu'o mi'e nam

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On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 04:28 +0200, Roman Naumann wrote:
> On Sunday 07 September 2008 21:17:58 Auke Booij wrote:
> > Good question. To me, the biggest difference lies near the philosophical
> > and metaphysical field, where people often talk about undefined ideas.
> > And then they come to strange conclusions.
>
> This is a very good point in my opinion.
> During the last few months, I have starting studying
> various works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
> and Kant in German, which is my first language.
> Quite often, I could not be sure how far
> an 'and' ("und") extends, or how many scopes
> were terminated by a ','.
> Maybe sounding trivial, in descriptions of abstract thought constructs,
> the difference often is very important.
> Whenever I find such a place, I realize the significance
> of grammatical unambiguity.
Cool, someone simply agrees with me! Now, for the practical solution,
can you be so kind as to give us a few examples? Of course, I'll write
down every ambiguity (both grammatically and dictionarirarilarily) and
mail them as soon as I have a substantial amount, but I guess you're
more into this.

> I am confident lojbanic works are innately capable of achieving
> a higher level of denseness, - given the structure of thought
> takes the lojbanic features into account.
Again, let us try and find examples, for these will be of great value in
this discussion.

> But it's not only 'denseness' as in shortness. Nowadays,
> I think it can be said to be commonly accepted
> that good (English) style (educational) is writing in short, simple sentences.
> In German, it's often even suggested to read the English (educational) books
> instead of the German ones, as they are less cryptic.
> Old German (I don't really know about old English or other languages),
> however, is something very different. Sentences of more than a page are no
> exception. Complex thoughts are not put into several sentences,
> but more often than not described as one.
A small sidenote to this: I, personally, simply *need* to find an elegant and logical framework in everything I learn (or at least try to learn). This appears to be the easiest with complex sentences. The difference with the problem you're indicating is that in "my" ideal text, there wouldn't be that many subsentences, but just a full explanation with all its characteristics. In your case, the problem is subsentences, which indeed are handled better in Lojban.

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> Use this thread to discuss the How to spread the word page.

I believe adding (a lot) more to the Lojbanic wikipedia will attract people. Lojban is a cool written language, it has ' for an h which makes it look extra-terrestrial. Also, if we add a lot more to the wikipedia, it will make people think it's "worth" learning Lojban. Why learn a language which doesn't have any literature/Media? So, it's worth a try. Also, if you add to the Lojbanic wikipedia, it will be like practicing your Lojban skills AND if you want you can even speak it out-loud while you read/write so you can become literate/fluent.

A good way for people to become fluent in Lojban would be, having a video online chat-room where people can talk face to face in lojban.

Oh, here is the website I was referring to:

jbo.wikipedia.org

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 14:46 -0700, arpgme wrote:
> Re: How to spread the word
>
> Author: arpgme
>
> > Use this thread to discuss the How to spread the word page.
>
> I believe adding (a lot) more to the Lojbanic wikipedia will attract people. Lojban is a cool written language, it has ' for an h which makes it look extra-terrestrial. Also, if we add a lot more to the wikipedia, it will make people think it's "worth" learning Lojban. Why learn a language which doesn't have any literature/Media? So, it's worth a try. Also, if you add to the Lojbanic wikipedia, it will be like practicing your Lojban skills AND if you want you can even speak it out-loud while you read/write so you can become literate/fluent.
>
> A good way for people to become fluent in Lojban would be, having a video online chat-room where people can talk face to face in lojban.
>
>
> Oh, here is the website I was referring to:
>
> jbo.wikipedia.org
>

Stop right there, before this becomes a big unregulated mess. Sure, we
can work on wikipedia articles, but this won't really help if it's not
concentrated. So what we need to do is pick out some english article
(not TOO long :P), translate it *and enhance it*. That way, we'll get a
featured article, which will most certainly attract others. Esperanto
has a number of these internationally featured articles right now, and
it really seems to help! Imagine: attracting a few people of all
linguistic civilisations, so basically from everyone.

However, how we should tackle this concentration is as of yet unclear to
me. I guess some website or mailing list could do it, but how would we
get the entire Lojban community to listen?

tulcod.

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Returning to the discussion on why it is needed.
Recently found in a news article:
"The specific section will have to have its temperature raised
significantly above its usual absolute zero so engineers can go in and
repair it without dying, which is apparently a very time-consuming
process."
What does the part starting at "which" refer to? The dying? the
temperature raising? The repairing? The going in of engineers?

On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 14:46 -0700, arpgme wrote:
> Re: How to spread the word
>
> Author: arpgme
>
> > Use this thread to discuss the How to spread the word page.
>
> I believe adding (a lot) more to the Lojbanic wikipedia will attract people. Lojban is a cool written language, it has ' for an h which makes it look extra-terrestrial. Also, if we add a lot more to the wikipedia, it will make people think it's "worth" learning Lojban. Why learn a language which doesn't have any literature/Media? So, it's worth a try. Also, if you add to the Lojbanic wikipedia, it will be like practicing your Lojban skills AND if you want you can even speak it out-loud while you read/write so you can become literate/fluent.
>
> A good way for people to become fluent in Lojban would be, having a video online chat-room where people can talk face to face in lojban.
>
>
> Oh, here is the website I was referring to:
>
> jbo.wikipedia.org
>
>
>
>
> To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org
> with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if
> you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.
>

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On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 13:05, Auke Booij <auke.booij@gmail.com> wrote:
> Returning to the discussion on why it is needed.
> Recently found in a news article:
> "The specific section will have to have its temperature raised
> significantly above its usual absolute zero so engineers can go in and
> repair it without dying, which is apparently a very time-consuming
> process."
> What does the part starting at "which" refer to? The dying? the
> temperature raising? The repairing? The going in of engineers?

I think, given the context, the only reasonable interpretation is that
"which" refers to the repairing, although I'm sure the dying could be
a lengthy process as well. The referent of the subordinate phrase can
only be determined using the meaning of the sentence as a whole, which
is a very common occurence in English. Most of the time it happens you
don't notice at all. This is a slightly unusual case in that the
potential reference nearest the subordinate phrase, dying, makes
superficial sense and during the brain's parsing of the sentence, may
be the preferred candidate for a few tenths of a second, lending it
some amount of conscious awareness and thus the potential to be
noticed. The worst you can accuse this sentence of is clumsiness.

Any good copy editor could tell you when the referent is too ambiguous
and have you rephrase the sentence. The above sentence would probably
be an edge case. But in Lojban this process is improved only slightly.
While the referent may be technically unambiguous (unless using one of
the explicitly ambiguous pro-sumti), I have encountered plenty of
instances in published Lojban text (not just IRC, but proofread stuff)
where the subordinate phrase was apparently, and rather obviously,
pointing to the wrong phrase. I would never have noticed these things
if I had not been reading it in my parser, and I doubt any other
Lojban reader would either, except rarely. Just because you're reading
Lojban doesn't mean you stop automatically and unconsciously
correcting small ambiguities/errors. Just because you're reading
Lojban doesn't mean you start parsing it the same way a computer
would.

I imagine if some Lojban text heavily relied on grammatical structure
to disambiguate things that would not otherwise be possible to
disambiguate, that reading that text would be a rather time-consuming
and laborious task. I believe most Lojban text relies on the semantics
just as much as English to disambiguate. Observe the ease of getting
gismu places switched around and still being understood.

Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)

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On 9/21/08, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I imagine if some Lojban text heavily relied on grammatical structure
> to disambiguate things that would not otherwise be possible to
> disambiguate, that reading that text would be a rather time-consuming
> and laborious task. I believe most Lojban text relies on the semantics
> just as much as English to disambiguate. Observe the ease of getting
> gismu places switched around and still being understood.
>

It's certainly possible to use context to disambiguate in Lojban. It's a
perfectly ordinary human language in a lot of ways. Now that I'm more
fluent I can usually guess at misspelled gismu, for instance. Indeed it's
my impression that those who came before us have given us a language which
has just about the right amount of redundancy in just about the right
places, which is impressive (and worlds better than most philosophical
languages).

I think that we also have some unusual tools of disambiguation, though,
which shouldn't be underestimated. One phrase that comes irresistably to my
mind on this topic is "lo melbi ko li'i cerni". When I first encountered
that sentence, I was confused for a few seconds. It was definitely
out of my comfort zone. We each have a terrain of what Lojban sentences we
expect to encounter, and a lot of our being able to easily understand and
disambiguate sentences we hear has to do with fitting them into our
habitually expected sentence shapes. There's another level that can come
into play when a sentence is unusual though: We have to put our Lojban
muscles into action, and tear the sentence apart logically by the rules.
("What's this now? OK, lo melbi.. and then ko is the x2? Of what? Oh
li'i! I see, ok, wtf is the x2 of li'i?!" etc)

So in the heat of the moment, Lojban as a spoken human language relies just
as heavily as any language on habit, familiarity, regularity. One
difference is the origin of those regularities: It's not just habit all the
way down, but at some point it encounters the bedrock of the formal grammar.
That means that inventive use of our language isn't just up to your organic
sense of the deep motion of the language (or your chutzpah); you can dig
down into the language and find something unusual and new that nonetheless
is crystal clear, that everyone will understand the same way (after a moment
of confusion).

I believe-- though my Lojban isn't quite at the level to prove it (I can
barely read simple texts)-- that for more fluent speakers this kind of
concrete inventiveness can be very natural and expansive. Of course you
can't actually just drive hard down into the grammar all the time, if you're
talking to a human, but you can make frequent experiments and excursions.
To me the beauty of it isn't merely that it's so simple that it
can be parsed by a
computer, but that it's so simple that it can be understood by a human
mind. Lojban is there before all of
us in the air, a shared hallucination of form which is
nonetheless tangible, a virtual reality we share.

What after all is the purpose of language? It is many purposes. Idle
conversation is one, but observe what the confusions & complexities of
Lojban become in real conversation in practice: A game! We bring out
confusing yet beautiful twists of language, like "lo melbi ko li'i cerni",
to watch each other think over them. We have an awareness
of which sentences will be familiar and which will be strange. Precise
carefully composed works is another purpose, and there I think we must of
course strive to use Lojban's unambiguous qualities not as a crutch, but as
an extra wagon to drag behind our already clearly constructed expressions.
I think if we use them well they can serve us well, and help allow very
clear and expansive communication.

mu'o mi'e se ckiku