From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Thu Mar 01 08:37:40 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:37:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HMoHj-0002Ot-Hg for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:37:39 -0800 Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.171]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HMoHa-0002Oh-Jw for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:37:39 -0800 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id 32so418363ugm for ; Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:37:29 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=domainkey-signature:received:received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=dusLTO1k7Xear8uOTYqeoGlYKPpAHEyQELB415q+a5sbynQNad90jPjXwUMNP4ZpzZDUPCUmxJKIPPwI2yGliWJBMpPef04J2bEDsVaTWEI8ycF88ItxICwTkI2Fv7zAOvK27/fWiQQJjBXASWvkmDsG4p9+Mz9WL4kGF/muAVs= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=beta; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=o+KRIOm/Z91R95uP0Ney491p9rICBx2OJX1pfX2suUVzh3pnsw4wGWti64wPUchgc5dQ/u+1l9w2GkmlRhrv924CsFwUJo9WeMgvRlwjX8SKl8Bur2+CMfzRQ804DFCSueWUeCfr8v9FkYwLG1H6phHOFRg1Qz7mYfP/xjwrh4g= Received: by 10.78.170.17 with SMTP id s17mr169166hue.1172767048345; Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:37:28 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.78.50.10 with HTTP; Thu, 1 Mar 2007 08:37:28 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <23dc8c770703010837o631b9ccbj2c3c27facc5abe8e@mail.gmail.com> Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2007 16:37:28 +0000 From: "Karl Naylor" To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: learning lojban In-Reply-To: <2CB51B91-3400-420A-A0F7-C5458D2AC954@umich.edu> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <20070228053052.DB4437DAE@bender.tigertech.net> <511FAF64-FAAB-4F36-9D7B-05F743E6F2DA@umich.edu> <20070301030125.6E2717DC1@bender.tigertech.net> <20070301053037.9D7977DC1@bender.tigertech.net> <2CB51B91-3400-420A-A0F7-C5458D2AC954@umich.edu> X-Spam-Score: -2.4 X-Spam-Score-Int: -23 X-Spam-Bar: -- X-archive-position: 4066 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: karl.org@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On 01/03/07, Alex Martini wrote: > first big hurdle in learning Lojban. For a beginning book, the fact > that every sentence is actually using first-order logic is pretty much irrelevant. I > actually would have preferred to see Lojban introduced with the natural language notion > of nouns and verbs first. Does this not present the danger of Lojbanists having difficulty in coming to think of sentences in terms of sumti and selbri instead of nouns and verbs, and instead importing non-Lojbanic concepts into their understanding of Lojban? I'm still mentally slapping myself on the wrist when I catch myself trying to build a Lojban utterance based on its English expression (which is troublesome of course, because it's hard to hold a concept in my head to be expressed in Lojban without an English expression popping into existence). I'm still nothing like advanced enough in the language to be sure, but it seems that a good way to encourage Sapir-Whorf effects to manifest would be to attempt to forget everything you know about other languages and try to understand Lojban on its own terms. Intuitively, I would like to see this emphasised right at the beginning of Lojban beginners' courses -- "don't try to look for nouns and verbs in this language, nor for any other concepts from other human languages you know. Looking for predicate calculus concepts is probably OK". Thoughts?