An opinion against Lojban/Loglan

[gleki]

This was posted earlier today in the Russian group of lidepla language.

The following is written allegedly by Stephen Rice according to the author of the group but it's not confirmed by anyone else. Anyway there will be no confirmation.

What's your opinion about the following ?

Briefly: I don't consider either Loglan or Lojban viable auxlangs.

They weren't designed for it. Their use of logical predicate

structure, while making simple sentences easy to produce, also bloats

the lexicon, because you technically need a new predicate every time

you change the underlying structure--something regular languages use

adpositions to do. Unfortunately, they weren't designed for ease of

derivation, either: Loglanists were originally supposed to chain

together individual predicate words, much as in Toki Pona. The

language was designed for that--it still is, despite some retrofits.

But it doesn't work. At least it doesn't if your predicate words are

all [CCV/CVC]CV in form and you have no good way to borrow. (Loglan

was originally supposed to be an experimental language, remember, not

necessarily a full-fledged everyday language.) So soon groda madzo

("big make"/enlarge) became groma, clika rando sonma madzo ("similar

end sound make"/rhyme) became cliransonma, and so on--without any real

derivational system.

Now, this wasn't entirely a bad thing, because there was no system for

figuring out the structure of these new predicates either, and if a

predicate's structure is incomplete, you begin generating nonsense

sentences the moment you do much with negation or quantification.

Lojbanists ignore this problem for some reason, though it's fairly

obvious, with the result that Lojban is pretty much designed to

produce gibberish for at least some predicates.

Anyway--to simplify derivation, the Great Morphological Revision

modified permissible predicate shapes and introduced

"djifoa"--abbreviated "affixes" for at least the more productive

roots. You can't predict which roots will have djifoa, nor what their

form will be, but once you memorize the djifoa, formal derivation is

fairly automatic.

This is clearly an awkward solution--a retrofit to fix a fatal design

flaw. What still astonishes me is that when the Lojbanists left

Loglan, they faithfully copied both flaw and retrofit. I would've

redesigned the system completely to eliminate the problem from the

beginning, but when I mentioned this to various Lojbanists, including

LeChevalier, their leader, they all replied that the djifoa system was

ingenious and worth preserving--they even took credit for it.

I've considered releasing a total reboot of Loglan without the

morphological and derivational bugs, but I think languages based on

logical predicates are inherently unnatural. Human languages are based

on linguistic predicates, which are in turn based on an overarching

web of relationships (case, etc.), not on mere place structure. One of

my personal oddities as a Loglanist was that I actually memorized the

place structures of predicates; most Loglanists (and Lojbanists, I

think) just memorized the basic meanings. But there's a difference

between

madzo = make

and

madzo = X makes Y from/out of Z.

Compare this with

brudi = X is a brother of Y through parents Z.

From a linguistic standpoint, the relationships differ sharply; as

logical predicates, however, their structures are identical. Loglan

mitigated this with a system of case tags, which the Lojbanists

rejected. My Loglan 2.0 would be based on such a case system. 

[Remo Dentato]

I stopped reading at:

> I don't consider either Loglan or Lojban viable auxlangs.

Neither do I, so I can't see how this could support any furhter argument.

Anyway, I quickly browsed the rest.

If I understood correctly, the author would have created a spin-off of
Loglan in a different way and his way would have been much better than
Lojban.

The problem is that he didn't.

I'll be very interested in his effort, I hope he will let us know when
he has completed his equivlent of CLL so we can compare the two
languages.

remod

[Escape Landsome]

It is sad you didn't pay attention to his post, there are a few valid remarks.

I especially retain this one :

natlangs are based on "linguistic predicates", Lojban on "logical
predicates". Linguistic predicates come in more naturally and allow
more semantic flexibility.

2012/2/24, Remo Dentato <rden...@gmail.com>:

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "lojban" group.
> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
>
>

[Pierre Abbat]

On Friday, February 24, 2012 05:20:48 gleki wrote:
> This was posted earlier today in the Russian group of lidepla language.
> The following is written allegedly by Stephen Rice according to the author
> of the group but it's not confirmed by anyone else. Anyway there will be no
> confirmation.
> What's your opinion about the following ?
>
> Briefly: I don't consider either Loglan or Lojban viable auxlangs.
> They weren't designed for it. Their use of logical predicate
> structure, while making simple sentences easy to produce, also bloats
> the lexicon, because you technically need a new predicate every time
> you change the underlying structure--something regular languages use
> adpositions to do. Unfortunately, they weren't designed for ease of
> derivation, either: Loglanists were originally supposed to chain
> together individual predicate words, much as in Toki Pona. The
> language was designed for that--it still is, despite some retrofits.

Lojban does have adpositions (sumtcita). All members of BAI are prepositions,
and tense markers can also be used as prepositions.

> From a linguistic standpoint, the relationships differ sharply; as
> logical predicates, however, their structures are identical. Loglan
> mitigated this with a system of case tags, which the Lojbanists
> rejected. My Loglan 2.0 would be based on such a case system.

What does he mean?

Pierre
--
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.

[Michael Turniansky]

   I assumed here he WAS talking about BAI, but I could be wrong.

                    --gejyspa

 

[rden...@gmail.com]

Il giorno , Escape Landsome <esca...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

> It is sad you didn't pay attention to his post, there are a few valid remarks.

I'm sure there are.

My point is that is very easy to criticize, it's much more difficult to create something comparable to Lojban.

For example, I would llike to have cmevla being also brivla, but I'm not sure about the impact on the rest of the langage and I'm not knowlegable enough to try to push.

I'll love to see this child of Loglan when it will see the light, but this doesn't mean I can't dismiss easy criticism from someone who just claim that he "could do it better".

remo

[selpa'i]

No, Loglan had cases, similar to BAI, but not quite the same. For example you'd have a case tag that tagged "recipient" or "agent". So with dunda, you could use the recipient tag to mark the recipient instead of having to put it in dunda3. The difference is that these tags were much less specific and there were only a bit over 10 of these so more overlap occured.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.

-- 
lo xlarai se cinmo cu ka nonkansa kei na gi'e ka ba'o se tolmorji zo'e noi do ba ze'e na kakne lo nu tolmorji fi ke'a

[la .lindar.]

He also seems to think there's no rule for making compound words. There is, in fact, a very rigid system that can be unambiguously disassembled into component words.

[.arpis.]

I think that his complaint (at least if he's complaining about
something reasonable) is that {lo clacizyjvovau} (to borrow a term
from the nomic game I keep meaning to resurrect but lack the time)
don't have a well defined place structure.

On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 7:47 PM, la .lindar. <lindar...@gmail.com> wrote:
> He also seems to think there's no rule for making compound words. There is, in fact, a very rigid system that can be unambiguously disassembled into component words.
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/lojban/-/yVVA49FlbxsJ.

> To post to this group, send email to loj...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+un...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
>

--
mu'o mi'e .arpis.

[Felipe Gonçalves Assis]

On 24 February 2012 22:33, .arpis. <rpglover...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think that his complaint (at least if he's complaining about
> something reasonable) is that {lo clacizyjvovau} (to borrow a term
> from the nomic game I keep meaning to resurrect but lack the time)
> don't have a well defined place structure.
>

If that lujvo were to be defined, and people found its place structure hard
to memorize, they could still use modal tags like {fi'o ve lujvo}. In tanru you
have the additional option of using linked sumti...

[Jonathan Jones]

If I remember correctly, there was mention of an idea to remove the seldom used places of various brivla and use BAI for them instead when they were needed.

mu'o mi'e .aionys.

.i.e'ucai ko cmima lo pilno be denpa bu .i doi.luk. mi patfu do zo'o
(Come to the Dot Side! Luke, I am your father. :D )

[gleki]

So if we add 10 more cmavo to lojban resurrecting those loglan cases I hope the problem will be solved

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.