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Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:22:34 -0400
From: "Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG" <lojbab@lojban.org>
Organization: The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Subject: Re: [lojban] The global problem of mirror paired predicates
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Gleki Arxokuna wrote:
> There are several pairs of predicates that can be expressed in a
> different way.
> 1. left - right
> 2. south - north
> 3. east - west
> 4. female - male
> 5. white - black
> 6. expensive - cheap
> 7. healthy - ill
> 8. good - bad
>
> Some conlangs like Esperanto have only one root for each pair and use
> prefixes (e.g. "anti-") to express the second member of the set.
> So
> left = anti-right
> ill =  anti-healthy
>
> or
> patro - father
> patrino - mother (suffix -in- for females)
>
> Ithkuil employs a different approach. It uses two affixes, something
> like "plus" and "minus" to determine where on the scale we are present.
> so e.g. we have a root for "good/bad" (let it be ROOT1) and for
>   "left-right" (let it be ROOT2) and mark them with prefixes.
>
> good = plus-ROOT1
> bad = minus-ROOT2
> right = plus-ROOT1
> left = minus-ROOT2
>
> If such policy applied in Lojbanistan left-handed people would
> definitely leave the community as "minus" prefix is associated both with
> "bad" and "left hand".
> Somehow we must choose what is positive and what is negative.
> Therefore I state that
> *AFFIX POLICY FOR SCALE PREDICATE IN ESPERANTO AND ITHKUIL IS NOT
> CULTURALLY NEUTRAL.*
> The only way to be culturally neutral is the policy of many natural
> languages, i.e. having two separate words for each member of the pair.
> In Lojban we have {zunle - pritu}, {bemro - snanu} etc.
> Note that even in Esperanto separate root appeared for cheap instead of
> just "anti-expensive" which proves that such policy is naturalistic.
>
> (This message appeared after discussing "clockwise" and
> "counterclockwise" concepts in a separate topic that in my opinion also
> deserve separate words).
>
> Other solutions are culturally non-neutral.
> Almost every person belongs  to some social minority: left-handed
> minority, sexual minorities, ethnic minorities. But together they
> constitute MAJORITY of the population.
>
> In other words only the current policy of Lojban is best.
> Yes, two separate words instead of one+affix is the cost of such neutrality.
> (If you wanna be non-neutral please use {tolpritu} instead of {zunle},
> it's absolutely not a problem).

I feel compelled to note, in light of your comments on the attitudinal 
system not being mapped to gismu, that we intentionally DID use scales 
and oppositional mapping for the attitudinals, knowing that what we were 
doing was not especially "neutral", and that the gismu were NOT 
necessarily scalar in the same way.  But it wasn't really a question of 
"cultural neutrality" per se, since so far as I know, no other 
language/culture attempts to map attitudes in any way like what we did 
in Lojban.

But in as much as some emotions require nai in order to be expressed and 
others do not (We didn't have the wordspace to *not* make use of 
opposition scales), it is arguable that Zipfean factors might cause bias 
towards the shorter words (whether Zipf's law might work to this effect 
is of course entirely hypothetical), and I chose the shorter ones to 
therefore be emotions that I thought were the more basic, or possibly 
the more positive/beneficial of the pairings in question.  If there has 
to be a bias, it might as well be a positive one.

But who am I to dictate what emotions are "positive"?  Just the guy who 
concocted the system.  I make no apologies %^)

-- 
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.

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