[frig]

Thanks for the response, I do appreciate it. I wasn't aware of how active lojban still is (and it's much more accessible to to get information on thanks to the internet).

I should point out that I'm fairly familiar with the general range of opinion in the linguistics community (as an undergrad I did dual math / linguistics, which made me at that time quite the rara avis, though it's more common now apparently).

Generally I don't give much credence to the idea of semantic primes (at all, not just in some pragmatic sense) but for stuff like spatial relationships + tenses (+ aspect, mood, etc.) it'd seem not an impossible undertaking (do enough reading in linguistic typology and you start seeing enough "repeats" to think such an enumeration might be possible).

After going through a bit of the grammar and the vocab list on wiktionary it seems like you'd have constant problems with synecdoche, which'd bother me (but perhaps only me, and it's not as though natural languages aren't riddled with similar problems).

I've walked away from this with a much stronger sense of the sense in which lojban is attempting to be a logical language, thanks for your time.

It's heartening to see substantial effort put into engineering language; good luck with your efforts.