Subject: Re: [lojban] Beyond Whorf: "things," "qualities," and the origin of nouns and adjectives

From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2000 00:24:19 +0300

"T. Peter Park" wrote:
> Whorf devoted many of his essays to describing in detail
> the differences between the basic English and Hopi metaphysical
> world pictures by a detailed comparison of the respective
> grammatical structures of English and Hopi.

It was many years ago that I first read Whorf's articles on this,
but I distinctly remember being highly intrigued by the idea of a
language that divides reality along noun-verb lines as unlike the
Old World languages as possible, if at all (and I have toyed with
this idea extensively in my own conlanging), but at the same time
remaining sceptical about it (Whorf's Hopi, Apachean, Nootka etc.
examples tend to be limited to one or two words -- who can say if
the same effects will obtain in a longer text?).

> It is also true whether or not any given language distinguishes
> words of classes (1), (2), and (3) as morphologically distinct
> "parts of speech" like Indo-European nouns, verbs, and adjectives
> [...] or follows the example of Chinese, Loglan, and Lojban in
> failing to make any such grammatical distinction [...].

Chinese does in fact make a clear distinction between the same
classes, only the criteria aren't the same as in, say, English
or Japanese -- the distinction is based on the ability of the
words to appear in various syntactic position (a verb can be
a predicate all by itself, whereas a noun wants a copula, and
so on). Not so in Lojban, where any gismu can appear in just
the same positions as any other, -- although *statistically*,
to be sure, some gismu are much more likely to appear as sumti
(or as final components in sumti tanru), others as non-final
components in tanru and yet others as brivla, and this is not
because there don't seem to be any Hopi-speaking Lojbanists.

> Words like "red, [...], beautiful" refer to one particular specific
> sensory, emotive, or aesthetic quality, which occurs over and over
> again in many, many different things in the world. Words like
> "stick, [...], bicycle" refer to complex persisting or recurring
> bundles or aggregates of such qualities that we notice as
> maintaining their character for fairly long periods of time [...].
> Words like "eat, [...], come" denote certain ways in which some
> such persistent bundles of qualities affect [...] other such
> persistent bundles of qualities, or move (or remain at rest)
> with respect to other such persistent bundles of qualities.

Which does not preclude a certain degree of arbitrariness in the
ways natlangs group the concepts into (morphologically and/or
syntactically defined) classes. This is a good reason for Lojban
to not define any such classes explicitly and instead allow every
gismu (and lujvo and tanru) to be used as anything.

> Now, if we take traditional Lockean-Humean British Empiricism
> seriously, it might seem that the words like "yellow, [...] ugly"
> are all that a truly rational language ought to contain, since
> after all we are not supposed to ever actually perceive anything
> except sensory, emotional, or aesthetic qualities in all sorts of
> complex combinations and sequences, [...] which can in principle
> be reduced to a listing of their individual component qualities
> ("this is something red, round, soft, and sweet accompanied by
> an emotion of pleasure").

Did Locke and Hume claim that perception is the only aspect
of cognition that a truly rational language should cater for,
or that no other aspects exist at all?

> Our australopithecine, *Homo habilis*, and *Homo erectus* ancestors for
> instance, had to react quickly, almost instantaneously, to a unified
> holistic gestalt "SNAKE!!" rather than take their leisurely sweet time
> nominalistically adding up one by one the individual qualities "long
> and slender and flexible and scaly and legless and forked-tongued and
> hissing"!

What if we did have an unlimited supply of leisurely sweet time?
Surely no bundle of perceptible qualities, however large, can
exhaust the concept of snakehood, defined (by us, not by our
distant ancestors) as membership of the suborder Serpentes?

-- 
<fa-al-_haylu wa-al-laylu wa-al-baydA'u ta`rifunI
wa-as-sayfu wa-ar-rum.hu wa-al-qir.tAsu wa-al-qalamu>
(Abu t-Tayyib Ahmad Ibn Hussayn al-Mutanabbi)
Ivan A Derzhanski <http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/>
H: cplx Iztok bl 91, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria <[email-masked]>
W: Dept for Math Lx, Inst for Maths & CompSci, Bulg Acad of Sciences