It's a core design flaw.
You see a fundamentally flawed system. I see resonances with word games played by children and the foundations of computer science. We may be looking at something that touches deeply in our psyche here and that makes it worth continuing to explore.
The lojban dictionary isn't even consistent on the meaning of melbi/beautiful.
Have you reported this bookkeeping error to the LLG? I'm sure they would be happy to correct one dictionary or the other if you did.
The lack of prepositions means that you can't use them for backrefrerencing.
Lojban offers a robust backreferencing facility. There are the KOhA and BRODA series for starters, and if you don't like using variables you can always simply name any grammatical construct using [something] du la [name].
The rise of China... I don't think Lojban can be that language.
Irrelevant as creating an international auxiliary lanugage is not the goal of the LLG. source
I wrote a few ideas of how a better language can look...
I'm happy that you have given the topic so much thought! I sincerely and enthusiastically look forward to studying your final product.
Peace, Friend.
I see resonances with word games played by children and the foundations of computer science.
Loglan did try to implement some of computer science but based on a 1955 understanding of what became to be computer science. James Cooke Brown didn't focus on math. Math had to be created by the Lojban project as an afterthought. Because Loglan isn't number friendly it gave useful gismu space to months and weekdays instead of simply calling them by numbers. It has 4 cardinal directions like natlangs instead of allowing the user to specify any angle he pleases.
L...
This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own. If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-the-fact update), then you should be able to link to the original comments that inspired this thread here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/cxb2
Is a lack of ambiguity necessary for clear thinking? Are there times when it's better to be ambiguous? This came up in the context of the extent to which a conlang should discourage ambiguity, as a means of encouraging cognitive correctness by its users. It seems to me that something is being taken for granted here, that ambiguity is necessarily an impediment to clear thinking. And I certainly agree that it can be. But if detail or specificity are the opposites of ambiguity, then surely maximal detail or specificity is undesirable when the extra information isn't relevant, so that a conlang would benefit from not requiring users to minimize ambiguity.
Moving away from the concept of conlangs, this opens up some interesting (at least to me) questions. Exactly what does "ambiguity" mean? Is there, for each speech act, an optimal level of ambiguity, and how much can be gained by achieving it? Are there reasons why a certain, minimal degree of ambiguity might be desirable beyond avoiding irrelevant information?