From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN Mon May 18 11:28:47 1992 Return-Path: Date: Mon May 18 11:28:47 1992 Message-Id: <9205181319.AA09925@relay1.UU.NET> Reply-To: Edmund Grimley-Evans Sender: Lojban list From: Edmund Grimley-Evans Subject: ruminations on bangu, place structures, and corners To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-Status: > Most English (and probably other language) usages of the form "language > of _____" where "_____" indicates either individuals or a group, are > referring to the native speakers. If this is primary, though, then we > restrict bangu only to natural languages, and Lojban is not a bangu, and > Esperanto is one only to the extent that there are a couple of native > speakers. There are many hundreds of native speakers of Esperanto, possibly thousands. > One also has to deal with the question of the importance of 'speaking': > does a mute person who uses 'Signed English' (as opposed to ASL) belong > to le se bangu be la gliban? How about someone who merely reads and > writes a language, possibly fluently, but does not speak it? (A lot of > Lojbanists are likely to become active members of a written Lojban > community long before they become speakers of any degree of fluency, and > I presume that many or even most Esperantists may be members of the > written language community without being part of the speaking > "community" such as there is one.) In the case of a language whose written form is rather different from the spoken form (e.g. Arabic, Chinese dialects), this is a sensible question. In the case of a language with (basically) phonemic writing (e.g. Esperanto, Lojban), it seems somewhat unnecessary to make any distinction between written and spoken use. > The only I cannot seem to paraphrase simply is meaning 2. But if le se > bangu only refers to native speakers, then Lojban isn't a language of > any kind. Some linguists indeed feel this to be the case - that a > language must have native speakers to be a language (others require an > active native-speaking community using it as their primary tongue, and > hence exclude Esperanto even with its few native speakers). Which linguists? (I would like to know so that I can avoid buying any books they might have written!) This totemisation of "native speakers" sounds like nineteenth-century mysticism, not like twentieth-century linguistics. By the way: Would anyone like to try giving a definition of "native language" or of "primary language" that doesn't break down immediately when applied to anyone who is even slightly bilingual?