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From: guskant <gusni.kantu@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2016 08:28:05 +0000
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Subject: Re: [Llg-members] International lojban community issues (was Re:
 2015 Annual Meeting)
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2016-02-16 19:54 GMT+00:00 Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder -
LLG <lojbab@lojban.org>:
> Response to older message exchange
>
>
> "la'oi" shouldn't need to be stated as experimental.  By the official
> design, it is inherently experimental because of its morphology.  All CV'VV
> words are experimental cmavo.  If byfy wants a new official word, they would
> be wise to assign a word in the normal cmavo space.
>


I don't talk about the morphology of {la'oi} but the experimental
selma'o ZOhOI for {la'oi} family that is not yet officially approved.
The grammatical structure created for ZOhOI conflicts Chapter 1
Section 1 of CLL in the property of cultural neutrality of Lojban. I
made a remark on it on an unofficial page of lojban.org:
"[...] it is unfair for the languages of the quoted parts that these
selma'o cannot be used for Polynesian languages in which a word may
include glottal stops, while they can quote even a full book in
Chinese or Japanese in which spaces or periods are unnecessary."
https://mw.lojban.org/papri/zantufa/en


>
> I think that this would be most easily solved only by someone from outside
> writing in Lojban that they wish to communicate with someone from the
> Japanese (or Chinese) community, about ______ topic, and could anyone
> interested please respond to ______ address.  This might take multiple
> attempts to get people to respond.  The challenge is to find topics that
> people are interested in talking about, and that has been a difficulty all
> along.  Lojbanists don't have any particular shared interests other than the
> language itself, and I'm not sure we need MORE discussion about Lojban in
> Lojban.
>
> (It would seem that exploring ways in which Lojban seems, or does not seem,
> to be culturally neutral from the perspective of a Japanese or Chinese
> speaker would be an interesting topic.  Several, years ago, I heard from one
> Chinese native speaker applauding Lojban as MORE neutral than Esperanto for
> X, Y, and Z reasons.  Flaws in that neutrality may also have been discussed
> - it was a long time ago.)
>


I agree that Lojbanists don't have any particular shared interests
other than the language itself. I found however some topics discussed
in their native languages that may be worth being known by the other
Lojbanists. It is difficult that Lojbanists outside of the communities
previously demand to be communicated about such an accidental topic.

For example, I saw a Chinese Lojbanist claimed in Chinese language
that the complete ban on consonant-glide-vowel (
https://mw.lojban.org/papri/BPFK_Section:_Ban_on_consonant-glide-vowel_strings
) brought them more difficulty in creating cmevla from Chinese names.
At the time of voting in BPFK, we had an alternative to save cmevla
from the ban, but BPFK finally decided the ban for all words.

Another example from a Japanese community in Japaense language is that
Lojban lacks a feature for expressing "role-wording" (yakuwarigo:
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%B9%E5%89%B2%E8%AA%9E
). It is a feature that a characteristic wording is always applied to
speech of a character in a story in order to express a
(stereo-)typical role. I myself hate that feature of Japanese, but it
is worth considering for cultural neutrality of Lojban. I think Lojban
can have that feature by implementing a COI cmavo for expressing a
(stereo-)typical role (the usage of the new cmavo should be similar to
{ci'oi} for psychomime suggested by Tijlan), but I have never seen it
were discussed in any English-spoken community.


> I don't think better tools will make people use the language more.  We need
> people writing things that other people are interested in reading.  News
> topics of international interest discussed inclusively of multiple
> viewpoints, short translations of poetry or humor.  Description of some
> cultural feature and how it would apply to expressing things in Lojban.
>
> (I would for example be interested in whether Japanese Lojbanists have
> attempted to use ga'i or some other element to translate or express
> Japanese-like honorifics in Lojban.  I don't know much about Japanese other
> than such honorifics exist, which suggests to me that a translation from
> Japanese to Lojban might use ga'i or something else. So there are two things
> needed - an explanation of how Japanese honorifics work, and a discussion of
> how to express them in Lojban and when it would seem appropriate to do so,
> and then perhaps a short text or translation in Lojban that actually uses
> these features).
>
> lojbab
>
>


I agree.

As for ga'i or ga'inai in Japanese, Tijlan and I used it for
translations of honorific expressions in Japanese texts.
Tijlan's translations:
https://sites.google.com/site/jbotijlan/lisri/mi-io-mlatu/pa-mo-o
https://sites.google.com/site/jbotijlan/lisri/le-gusta-co-minde-mutce
My translation:
http://guskant.github.io/yabu/

However, I have not much observed any use of ga'i in Lojbanic creation
by Japanese people other than translations. It is natural according to
Roman Jakobson's assertion:
"Thus the true difference between languages is not in what may or may
not be expressed but in what must or must not be conveyed by the
speakers."
https://books.google.com/books?id=qcrXOJD3UGcC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA262#v=onepage&q&f=false

Japanese grammar implements distinction between honorific and
non-honorific expressions, and the speakers must choose an appropriate
expression among them. On the other hand, ga'i of Lojban is optional:
a Lojbanic sentence with no ga'i is not regarded as non-honorific.
Speakers of Lojban, even if originate in Japanese speakers, don't
especially use optional honorific.

(I think it is the key feature of cultural neutrality of Lojban that
most expressions that are grammatically forced in natural languages
are optional in Lojban. It is worth mentioning in the next version of
CLL as a culturally neutral structure of Lojban.)

mi'e la guskant mu'o

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