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From: John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: [lojban] Re: Oldbie Question from private mail.
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As one of the people who think that the basic
comparative form of the "adjectival" brivla is
one of the better features of Loglan (and
dropping it one of the flaws of Lojban), let me
add some notes here.

1. The decision to set up adjectives this way in 
Loglan was based on studies of the _linguistic_
behavior of such words, how best to account for
that behavior at a fundamental level.  Thus, much
of the stuff about theories in physics or
psychology or art were irrelevant (as they should
have been) to the basic concepts -- though they
play roles in related notions like "color" and
"weight" and the like.

2. The theory involved was primarily about
attributive usage ("blue dog"), secondarily about
 predicative ("dog is blue") and hardly at all
about more abstract usage ("That color is blue"),
though that is ultimately accounted for as well. 
"Scientific" color theories (for example) is
primarily about the last sort and is thus remote
from primary uses of color words.

3.  Within the primary use of color terms, the
main problem in Loglan was always "What goes in
the unfilled second place?"  The general answer
was (and is) that unfilled places are treated as
particularly quantified variables, but that
clearly does not work for adjectives of this
sort, since anything (well, just about) is bluer
than something and, thus, blue.  But, of course,
that was not the convention for adjectives,
though people frequently forgot -- or liked to
argue for the confusion it shed.  In attributive
position, {blanu broda}, what was needed was a
broda blue than the normal (typical,...) broda --
which might not be very blue at all or might be
very blue indeed, depending.  In predicative
position, the missing place was just again the
norm for whatever sort of thing the subject was
(though this could be open to a variety of
interpretations even if the species were
specified in naming the subject).

4. Although there was a lot of talk about
scientific color theories (light, pigment,
perceptions -- down to rods and cones -- and so
on), the point that drove the decision to drop
the basic comparative form seemed to me to be
this old bit about the missing place (Of course,
since I thought the science stuff was irrelevant,
I may have missed the importance of its role. 
Still, the missing place arguments came up as
often as any other.) 

5.  At some point in Loglan days, JCB came up
with the "for a" locution (it may have been in
the original studies -- I have lost the
references on them) to make the case clearer: a
blue dog is a dog that is blue for a dog, not
simply a dog that is (in some absolute sense)
blue.  Indeed, if we went by the scientific
stuff, a blue dog probably wouldn't be blue at
all, being nearer to several other standard chips
(or whatever test) than to blue.  But, as dogs go
(they not ever getting very close to standard
blues, after all) it is blue.
    

--- Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote:

> 
> Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:
> 
> >On Wed, 12 Jan 2005, Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> >
> >  
> >
> >>Someone sent me (as lojban@lojban.org)
> private mail to ask:
> >>
> >>   3) This url states that  :
> http://arj.nvg.org/lojban/myths.html
> >>
> >>   When the new vocabulary was made after the
> Loglan/Lojban split,
> >>   the semantics of the colour adjectives
> were changed. The word
> >>   "blanu" no longer meant "x1 is bluer than
> x2", but "x1 is blue".
> >>   The justification for this change was "we
> don't want a world
> >>   where everything strives to be bigger,
> better and taller than
> >>   everything else". This is clearly a strain
> of the Western ideal
> >>   of equality, which by no means can be
> called "culturally
> >>   neutral".
> >>
> >>   Is this all true?
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >It was I who wrote the above paragraph.
> >
> >The fact that the Loglan prim "blanu" had two
> places, can be seen from the 
> >Scientific American article, and from 
>
>http://www.lojban.org/files/draft-dictionary/Working/OLDLOG.TXT
> , where 
> >Loglan "blanu" is translated as Lojban
> "blamau".
> >
> >As for the claim that the place structure
> change was motivated by some 
> >ideal of equality, all I can say is "I think
> someone wrote that on the 
> >mailing list somewhere". Unfortunately, when I
> wrote that web page, I 
> >didn't yet realize how important it is to
> include references. I think 
> >sure I could find the original passage
> somewhere with some web searching, 
> >but I'm not entirely sure. If that turns out
> not to be the case, I'll 
> >remove that claim.
> >
> >In any event, the remaining bullet points in
> that section are enough to 
> >underscore the main point: that it is not
> possible to achieve full 
> >cultural neutrality, because you cannot fully
> liberate yourself from the 
> >biases inherent in your thought. I now realize
> that that is not expressed 
> >as explicitly as it should be.
> >
> >  
> >
> Nora just pointed this put to me, so sorry for
> the very delayed response.
> 
> The above cited by Robin from your email was
> NOT the reason for the 
> change in the color word semantics.
> 
> The reasons were multiple
> 1) Color perception studies have shown that the
> raw comparative form 
> does NOT match how we decide what color
> something is.  For most color 
> identification, color-space is divided
> semantically with boundaries 
> approximately defined by closeness to some
> prototype ideal of the 
> color.  Thus we say that an object is blue
> because it is more like our 
> prototypical blue than it is like, say, a
> prototypical green.  BUT we 
> are comparing against a full set of prototypes
> for our culture, which 
> set serves as a standard, and the standard is
> critical to the color 
> identification (Kay and Kempton showed that
> some cultures use different 
> prototypical standards).  There are certain
> colors that English speakers 
> will call simply "black" because that is what
> they are closest to in our 
> set of colors.  But Chinese speakers will label
> various off-black tinges 
> as being "red" that we call "black".  They are
> redder than they are, 
> say, blue, but they are so unsaturated that
> they do not cross the 
> English-speaker's threshold of no longer being
> "black". 
> 2) A related problem is an object that is
> "brown".  Given that brown is 
> additive from red and green, we could say that
> a brown  object is 
> "greener" than a (red) apple, but we still
> would not call it "green".  
> Using the comparatives as primitive, there is
> no clear way to specify 
> something as being "green" as opposed to
> "greener than a non-green thing".
> 3) Still another variation on an example would
> be a "blue" sky and a 
> pair of "blue" jeans.  These are both blue. 
> But which is "bluer"  If we 
> say that the sky is bluer, we are implying that
> the bluejeans are NOT 
> blue, since they are not "bluer".
> 4) Then, we had the question of additive and
> subtractive colors.  Brown 
> is an additive combination of green and red,
> but it is a subtractive 
> combination of some other colors.  So whether
> something brown is 
> "greener" than an apple per the above example,
> depends on whether it is 
> additive or subtractive.
> 5) Finally, we had the question of observing
> conditions.  When I was 
> young we used a color wheel to illuminate our
> Christmas tree, and thus 
> the perceived colors of the silver tinsel
> changed from red  to blue to 
> green to yellow in rotation.  So what color was
> the tinsel.  Furthermore 
> the illumination was additive to all of the
> objects on the tree, so they 
> also changed color.  Changing the background
> can also affect color 
> perception, and there are optical illusions
> based on that change.
> 
> We wanted to try to do colors as X1 is [color]
> to observer X2 by 
> standard X3 under conditions X4,
> and indeed something like that was chosen for
> skari (exactly how the 
> color goes into x2 of skari these days is an
> issue to be decided - I've 
> always used "loka [color]" but there was no
> rule). But there were simply 
> too many possible definitions of what a "color"
> was (I haven't even 
> touched on the scientific classification of
> color by hue, saturation, 
> etc.)  Thus we simply left the uncertain places
> off, making the 
> primitive root nonspecific, and intending that
> people could add places 
> with BAI to suit a particular semantics of the
> color (or make lujvo 
> systematically).
> 
> We believed that only this approach skirted all
> of the above problems, 
> and thus made it possible to have cultural
> neutrality in color 
> definitions by letting people add whatever was
> necessary to the color 
> concept they wished to convey.
> 
> I don't think we have ever claimed that an
> individual can free 
> themselves from cultural bias.  The goal in the
> language is not to bias 
> the language design to favor the concepts or
> manner of thinking of any 
> one culture.  We do this by allowing multiple
> options where possible and 
> removing mandatory specificity when we can
> (e.g. tense and number)
> 
> lojbab
> 
> 
> 
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