Re: THEORY: irregular conlangs

John Cowan writes:
 > Padraic Brown scripsit:
 >
 > > place to meet Conlanging babes.
 >
 > Of course for "babe" read "attractive member of the appropriate sex".

Okay, John. So what's the lojban word for that? The gismu "cinse"
seems to have some relevance :-), as does "trina". The list of lujvo
doesn't seem to have anything quite like "babe" (by your longer
definition) in one word.

 > > I suppose the most important aspects
 > > would be (depending on your current interest) the explorations of logic or
 > > finding girls. ;)
 >
 > People vary.  Some folks are highly into Lojban as IAL: there is a guy
 > trying to make it an (or *the*) official language of the European
 > Patent Office.  Personally, I like the "toy" aspects.

Someone else is asking for it for describing some things about Linux.

There is also the appeal of lojban as a way to clarify the *intent* of
your speech. As pointed out elsewhere, sure, words are labels for
concepts, and are of a necessity flawed (as any abstraction is - if it
isn't simplifying things, it isn't being useful (Godel's Lemma for
Postmodernism?))  But many natlangs have problems even being precise
about which labels are connected to which other ones (e.g., the
canonical "beautiful little girls school").

With lojban, you can do a better job limiting the fuzzy concepts (the
"axioms" if you will) to fewer parts of the discourse than with any
other languages I have seen. The rest of the discourse becomes
theorems predicated (literally) on a few things we agree are
imprecise. Like points and lines in geometry. Everyone "knows" what
they are, but we can't define them in any rigorous way - we just have
to agree on certain properties.  Choosing different properties to
agree on gives us a different discourse, but no less valid. Like
Riemannian or Lobachevskian geometry.

Brook


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