On 4 August 2012 14:44, Gleki Arxokuna &= lt;gleki.is= .my.name@gmail.com> wrote:

Honestly, we both speak European languages= . That's why our opinion means nothing as we can't remove our cultu= ral bias.

We need someone from another culture (like Navajo speak= er).

Speaking about me as another participant i= n this conversation, my mother tongue is Finnish, which isn't an Indo-E= uropean language, and I used to know Japanese pretty well, another non-Euro= pean language. These two languages differ greatly from each other, even ign= oring the writing systems, but in principle English is for me just as alien= and different as Japanese. Finnish culture has, of course, during the last= few centuries been greatly affected by the general European culture and la= tely especially by Anglo-American culture, but this hasn't too much aff= ected the basic structure of the language. Personally I'm reasonably fl= uent (at least in reading) in three Indo-European languages, i.e., Swedish,= German and English, and have also studied Russian and French, which gives = me a rather good grasp of the differences between my mother tongue and a va= riety of European languages, between the fundamental distinctions these lan= guages make. Finnish doesn't make a gender distinction, definite/indefi= nite distinction is rather tricky to express in a proper, native way, and p= art/total distinction is perhaps the most essential and for foreigners the = hardest to learn distinction affecting even our approach to basic quantific= ation. The old, aboriginal Finnish culture was quite animistic, but this di= dn't affect the set of pronouns available, which, however, didn't l= imit our ability to express everything deemed necessary within that culture= .

No language can in a natural way express every fine sha= de of meaning some other language can, not at the level of grammar, not at = the level of native vocabulary, not at the level of inherited cultural unde= rstanding, not at a level every user of the language can fully grasp. Every= translation from one language to another has to bridge a gap, sometimes a = narrow one, sometimes an almost impossibly wide one. Considered against the= overall background of natural languages, a constructed language always rep= resents, of needs, a set of more or less arbitrary choices made by the deve= lopers, choices giving the language its distinct flavor. Most constructed l= anguages have tried to be as natural as possible, just trying to remove som= e perceived "weaknesses" of some arbitrary set of natural languag= es or trying to be as easy to learn as possible. OTOH, =A0Loglan/Lojban was= intentionally designed to be in a way as different as possible, and thus m= ore weight has been given to being able to express naturally some things an= d ideas awkward to express either in the natural languages in general or in= the Indo-European languages familiar to the developers in particular -- th= e keyword here is "some" as the total set of possible features is= way too large. Lojban, like every language, will always have limitations, = and more important than being able to express things the way they are expre= ssed in other languages is to develop a native idiomatic way of expression = using the existing machinery with all its possibilities and native implicat= ions. The time for any extension comes when it is felt that something impor= tant enough and frequent enough cannot be expressed simply enough in the wo= rld that is then.

mu'o mi'e veion

=A0 web site: http://galactinus.net/vilva/

=A0 on Google+:= https://plus.google.com/106533767817816079660/posts

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