Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 21 January 2014 13:20:25 R A Brown wrote:

> On 21/01/2014 08:12, Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:01 PM, R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> But I guess Jörg, like me, recalls a time when Lojban
> >> was more explicit about the possible auxlang goal.
> > 
> > It might be true that creators of Loglan and Lojban
> > viewed  it as an auxlang too.
> 
> On the Loglan website you will find: "Many loglanists
> believe, too, that their adopted language is ideally suited
> to become a lingua franca for the world. Its clarity and
> lack of cultural bias are just what is needed to cement
> international cooperation."
> http://www.loglan.org/what-is-loglan.html
> 
> On looking more closely at the Lojban site, I find: "Some
> people are interested in Lojban as a prospective
> international auxiliary language."
> http://www.lojban.org/tiki/The+Complete+Lojban+Language

This all means that the statement "Loglan/Lojban is not an IAL"
is not 100% true.  It may not be its *primary* purpose, but
unlike semi-humorous proposals of using Quenya as an IAL (which
never was Tolkien's intention, as far as we can tell), it was
an *official* or at least "quasi-official" *secondary* purpose
of these languages.

> But I don't want to prolong this point.  the subject line is
> about the viability of loglangs for _general purpose_, not
> some special purpose such as an auxlang.

Fair.  The suitability of a conlang to the application as an IAL
does not belong here; it belongs to AUXLANG.  Just one brief
remark: Given the wide range of international communication,
from ordering drinks at a bar in a foreign country to presenting
results of scholarly work on an international conference, I feel
that a good IAL must be a good general-purpose language.

And I feel that logical languages are *not* viable for general
purpose.  Conversation is conversation; formal logic is formal
logic.  Using formal logic, even if wrapped in consonants and
vowels, for conversation, probably does not work well.  However,
I haven't tried, and perhaps the Lojbanists have made a different
experience.
 
> And has written "Xorban had the potential to be a
> state-of-the art loglang, and the first ever loglang whose
> design is not patently a failure."
> 
> To which Leonardo replied: "IMHO, something that probably
> make Xorban intrinsically less popular than Lojban (and
> similar) is its disregard for some real-life-usage
> features ..."
> 
> I am not an expert in this area, but AIUI it is the
> additional "real-life features" - or at least some of them -
> that have been added to Lojban that leads And to regard that
> language as compromised and a failure as a longlang per_se.
>   According to this logic, and I have some sympathy for it,
> the very fact that Lojban has added "real-world" compromises
> brings into question the viability of pure loglangs for
> general purpose usage (I'm sure And will correct me if I've
> misunderstood him).

The compromise begins with wrapping the whole things in vowels
and consonants ;)  But I have observed in the past that the SVO
word order used in Lojban is an intrusion of the concept of a
"sentence subject" which is alien to formal logic.
 
> On 20/01/2014 21:48, Alex Fink wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > What probably made Xorban less popular than Lojban was
> > *nothing at all* intrinsic, but rather the fact that
> > Lojban builds on a nearly 60-year history including
> > dissemination in Scientific American and was a vast
> > number of folks' first exposure to the idea of a loglang,
> > and has a compendious reference grammar, whereas Xorban
> > is a recent unfinished experiment by a handful of folks
> > on a mailing list.
> 
> Of course!!

Which means that Lojban has a *huge* head start over Xorban.

> [snip]
> 
> > Getting there first is 90% of the battle; in this sense
> > Lojban is the Esperanto of loglangs.
> 
> Yep - and James Cooke Brown's Loglan is their Volapük   ;)
> 
> Getting there first is the crunch.

Fair.  TLI Loglan was the first; Lojban managed to race past it
because its creators made apt use of the Internet.  Also, TLI
Loglan was weighed down by copyright issues, if I remember the
story correctly.  (The LLG relexed the whole language in order
to avoid legal problems with TLI.)  All others now have to
compete with Lojban.

> >> PS - I'll reply to Jörg's comments on Liva later, when
> >> 
> >>  I've looked out my notes    :)
> 
> On 20/01/2014 20:53, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> 
> > On Monday 20 January 2014 15:50:41 R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> Thirdly, Claudio wrote: "It can be seen as an
> >> experiment, trying to satisfy both the requirements of
> >> logic and the aesthetic preferences of its author."
> >> Indeed, the aesthetic preferences of its author do
> >> come through.
> > 
> > Did he ever come up with a manifesto in which he laid
> > them out?
> 
> Not that I am aware of. He does say that "Liva
> phonotactics... is intended to be based on the same
> principles of easiness both in pronouncing and perceiving",
> and refers to Rick Morneau's essay on the morphology of an
> artificial language.

Well, I see quite a few phonemes that most people on Earth will
not find easy: the distinction between _l_ and _£_, the front
rounded vowels, the dental fricatives, the velar fricatives.
I feel that symmetry defeats easy pronunciation here.
 
> > He seems to like cookie-cutter phoneme inventories that
> > lend themselves to binary encoding, though ;)
> 
> He doesn't AFAIK mention binary encoding; but but as their
> are 32 phonemes arranged in (to use Tolkien's Tengwar
> terminology) four series (témar) of eight grades (tyeller);
> the difference between Claudio's system and Tolkien's is
> that the tengwar denote only consonants.  The eight grades
> of Liva include both consonants and vowels, there being six
> grades of consonants (as in tengwar) and two grades of vowels.
> 
> I don't recall Claudio linking this to binary coding, tho of
> course such a system could be encoded in groups of five
> bits.  from what I recall, he liked the symmetry of the
> Turkish vowel system (as have many others, including myself)
> and built things up from there.  It's symmetry, I think,
> that Claudio likes, not whether it makes binary coding easy.

Yes.  Symmetry obviously was all the matter here; that the
dimensions of the grid (4x8) lend themselves well to binary
encoding may be coincidental.  He may have been just as happy
with a 3x6 grid, but perhaps felt that 12 consonants and six
vowels wouldn't be enough.
 
> [snip]
> 
> >> Meantime, Liva is one of the conlangs I like.    :)
> > 
> > This is a point where our tastes differ.  I do not
> > consider Liva particularly beautiful.  It is, well, too
> > obviously engineered and mechanical.  Elegant, yes,
> 
> It's elegant.

Sure.
 
> But I must confess, I was confusing Liva in my mind with
> Kinya, which is a _very_ different beast.  I guess the
> problem is the authors of both are Italians, both names are
> disyllabic, the final vowel being -a, and the vowel of the
> first syllable being -i-.  Feeble, I know - just put it down
> to senility   ;)

I know nothing about Kinya.  Google finds nothing; a search in
this list's own archive turned up a web address which no longer
works.
 
> BTW I think And probably added the parenthesis "(No
> disrespect meant to Liva or its creator.)" because of his
> respect for Claudio, which I share.
> 
> BTW, those not familiar with Liva, may be interested in:
> http://web.archive.org/web/20091025104823/http://geocities.com/gataspus/liv
> a.htm
> 
> I'm not sure that Kinya now has a web presence.  In any
> case, it is not a loglang and is not relevant to this thread.

OK.

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