From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Tue Apr 17 06:49:17 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:49:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1Hdo3T-0002PP-Ks for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:49:12 -0700 Received: from smtp.mail.umich.edu ([141.211.14.81] helo=hackers.mr.itd.umich.edu) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1Hdo31-0002P7-Sl for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:49:03 -0700 Received: FROM [141.213.221.81] (bursley-221-81.reshall.umich.edu [141.213.221.81]) BY hackers.mr.itd.umich.edu ID 4624CFFD.C3EA5.3743 ; 17 Apr 2007 09:47:41 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.3) In-Reply-To: <1189A858F8918F43BE3F9C7603C73FB4031E7C9E@0456-its-exmp01.us.saic.com> References: <1189A858F8918F43BE3F9C7603C73FB4031E7C9E@0456-its-exmp01.us.saic.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: <1E7889F1-A5BB-4A2F-89F2-2ACCDCBE9881@umich.edu> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis From: Alex Martini Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Lojban geography and cultures Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:47:35 -0400 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-Spam-Score: -2.6 X-Spam-Score-Int: -25 X-Spam-Bar: -- X-archive-position: 4274 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: alexjm@umich.edu Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners On Apr 17, 2007, at 7:28 AM, Turniansky, Michael wrote: > [ li'o ] > > Lack of cultural bias? No, that’s an almost-meaningless > catchphrase thrown around the lojban community (and inherited from > loglan). What it really means in terms of neutrality is that the > grammar allows you the flexibility to express things in any number > of grammatical ways, reflecting the grammar of a huge variety of > natural languages (and many more ways not reflective of any natural > language), and that the wordstock did not come from any single > language or language family, but is a blending of languages spoken > by billions of people, thereby obscuring any cultural bias in word > choice. This is probably the best way I've heard to define "culturally neutral", which is otherwise one of the more misunderstood claims about Lojban. I think that it also makes more sense if you look at other 'international languages' from the period around & before Loglan was created. Esperanto (and it's descendent Ido) Interlingua and Volapük, to name a few, all had very European grammatical ideas of sentance structure and drew almost exclusively from European languages for their vocabulary. Lojban very clearly has a different-from-every-language notion of grammer, and the vocabulary was drawn from English, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic (if I don't misremember) so -- in comparison to other very European languages -- it is quite a bit more neutral. > The vocabulary itself, on the other hand, makes choices on what it > can say easily and what it can’t. (Why is there a native word > (gismu) for lions, tigers, and elephants, but none for zebras, > rhinos, or hippo (or antelope, but I suppose some would argue > “mirli” can be used for that)? Why for rat and mouse and rabbit, > but not squirrel or raccoon (or even “rodent” in general)? Why for > rose and tulip, but not for daisy or lily? Etc. etc.) Everything > comes down to choices made by the language creators, and as such, > represents a bias of some sort or other. So I don’t personally > speak of lojban as “culturally-neutral” except when it comes to the > grammar and word sources. Period. That's probably the best policy. mu'o mi'e .aleks.