Originally posted by Astyanax
Sprechen sie Klutz?
Who wants a language without ambiguity? Just imagine how impoverished our lives would become.
No more puns, double-entendres or word-games, no more dropped hints, no more equivocations and convenient misunderstandings, no more breathtaking
imagery and metaphor, no more tact and diplomacy, no more left-handed compliments, no more damning with faint praise. No room for compromise and
negotiation between opponents. No room for changing course once committed.
We would all be obliged to become barefaced liars just to stay alive.
Hellish. Simply hellish.
It might appeal to the socially inept, I suppose, since it would reduce us all to their level.
Most humor arises from situation and character and is as funny in Lojban as in any language. Humor based on word play, of course, is
language-dependent. Lojban has no homonyms, and hence no simple puns; puns derived from similar sounds are still possible, and have in fact been
attempted (for example in the Lojban translation of Alice in Wonderland). Since Lojban will almost always be a second language, bilingual puns and
word play abound, often based on the relative ambiguity of the other languages involved. Humor based on internal grammatical ambiguity is of course
impossible in Lojban, but humor based on nonsensical statements, or on logical structures that would be difficult to clearly express in another
language, becomes easier.
As speakers become fluent, and conventional phrases come into use, Lojban will develop its own forms of spoonerisms and subtle puns. Unique forms of
Lojban word-play have already turned up; they exploit the way small variations in Lojban grammar create unexpected variations in meaning, and the
capability to simply express rather mind-boggling relationships. Like all word-play, these lose zest when translated into other languages.
Related to humor is the aphorism: the pithy saying that gains pungency or poignancy from terse, elegant phrasing. Lojban seems as capable of aphorisms
as any language, perhaps more than most; however, because the language is so young, few such aphorisms have been devised to date.
