[Cryptography] Lojban signatures

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2025-08-27, Seth David Schoen wrote:

> Apparently even serious Lojbanists may need such tools.  For example, in
>
> https://wikitongues.org/videos/john_20151003_jbo/

The serious Lojbanists, I'm told, do not quite need them. They rather 
make them, in order to make themselves even better at their thing, and 
so espouse the power of the tool. In fact that, how the elders told me, 
was why and how the entire language as concocted the way it was, in the 
first place.

I do have to point out, though, that I'm a native and well versed Finn. 
Finnish might not quite explain Lojban/Loglan, but it does explain High 
Elvish, and the interest in systematic agglutination. Why liguists like 
this precise same thing, if it was the machine God Drug. The precise 
thing where Lojban diverges from its isolating tendencies, and where it 
starts to be so widely, humanly expressive. The step towards 
agglutination, not the other two ones in the cycle.

> John Cowan, the author of the main Lojban book, says "I don't speak 
> the language myself, even though I did write a grammar book about it 
> -- I'm just basically no good at memorizing vocabulary, which is why 
> I'm going to read a passage, because I'm just not fluent in terms of 
> constructing it".

Then on the other hand every decent linguist, cryptographer, and 
basically everybody else interested in langugage, can really do 
grammatical generalizations effortless, and while liking the process. 
I'll give you just one example of my own.

Because I *always* felt there was something *wrong* with the Finnish 
conjugation scheme for the nouns. Something was missing. I even tried to 
tell my languaage teacher, but couldn't quite put my finger on the 
problem. She didn't catch on.

What I missed actually has a name. It's the excessive case, within the 
Finno-Uralic language family. It's extant; it's being used right now, 
just not in my current, sanctioned, Formal Finnish. That thing, neatly 
fills out a 3x3 9-field in our case system, which nobody reaally 
expected to be there.

And which I can now use. Productively. So that everybody else even 
understands what I'm talkoing about. *This* is what Cowan (and the 
younger Chomsky) is talking about: the understanding of the structure of 
languaage, as opposed to getting just the nuance of one.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - decoy at iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front
+358-40-3648785, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2