Return-Path: Message-Id: <9205151340.AA15590@relay1.UU.NET> Date: Fri May 15 10:29:28 1992 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: ruminations on bangu, place structures, and corners X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Fri May 15 10:29:28 1992 X-From-Space-Address: cbmvax!uunet!CUVMA.BITNET!LOJBAN While slowly reading my backed-up mail queue, I noted a non Lojban List discussion last month (Mark and Ivan) about what a good Lojban word for 'natural languages', I think you can eliminate the problems of 'rarna bangu' by making it "rarna farvi bangu" (naturally-developed language). However, this question prompted a somewhat different one in my mind. I started with a comment in this discussion about "national languages" being inappropriate for the concept. This brought to mind that Lojban has a finer division of the semantics of people-groupings than many or even most languages. We have natmi (nation/ethnos) distinct from gugde (country) distinct from jecta (polity) distinct from kulnu (culture) distinct from cecmu (community). These relate a group of people and their common characteristic. bangu is also one of these people-grouping words, in a sense. The defined place structure for bangu is "x1 is the language of people x2". It defines the group of people by their common language. But in light of this discussion, I now see two readings of this statement, and am unsatisfied. 1. "of people x2" might refer to any speaker of the language, with any degree of fluency (or even with a specified minimum degree of fluency) 2. "of people x2" might refer to the group of people who are native speakers 3. "of people x2" might refer to a community of speakers who use a language regularly in daily life All are problematic as the word is typically used. 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. Definition 3 is the most important alternative interpretation, and may be most common when we turn the phrase around (se bangu). When we use "Russians" to refer to people who speak Russian, we are not necessarily referring only to those who speak the language natively, since I think that someone could be considered a member of this community after acquiring it fluently in later life, and adopting Russian as his primary tongue. We certainly here in the US frown on distinguishing or excluding immigrants who successfully adopt the English language as their primary tongue in place of their native language (and what of a child who acquires English as a second language while still young, and essentially has lost his native language by adulthood by sheer non-use). This may suggest a fourth possibility, which is that buying into a language to the degree necessary to be part of its 'community' means buying into the 'culture' of those who speak the language. That there is a tie between language and culture is inarguable even discounting the determinism proposed by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It might be that this sense of culture is distinct from ethnos (se natmi) or even the more general culture of a people (kulnu). But to the extent that every natural language >IS< associated with an ethnic culture, "selnatmi bangu" may indeed be appropriate for 'natural language', and indeed this 4th possibility is probably adequately covered by the tanru (and associated lujvo) "bangu natmi". Using this argument, possibility 3 can be covered by "bangu cecmu", though I'm not sure I'm satisfied by this. We still haven't dealt with the disinction between meaning 1 and all of the rest. I am not a native speaker of Lojban, only barely a part of a Lojban speaking 'community' in that we had a sustained conversation group here in DC until Athelstan's accident. 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.) It is possible that meaning 1 is covered by cusku/ve cusku - loi cusku be fo la lojban. are those who have expressed meaningful expressions communicatively in Lojban. 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). If we limit ourselves in languages to only those spoken by native speakers, we have chosen one of the most constrained definitions, and we make talk of "artificial bangu" or "planned bangu" to be poor metaphors, since the x2 of bangu that sticks with the tanru has no legitimate value. We haven't yet addressed one other, more devastating problem: does 'bangu' exclude computer languages, mathematical language, etc. We use the term language for a communicative system which may not be spoken, or speakable by anyone, and which is appropriate as a 'native' or 'primary' language. Thus "of people x2" may simply be an inappropriate place for bangu. One possibility, but I'd like to see others' ideas: x1 is a language used by x2 to communicate x3 (which ties more strongly to cusku and meaning 1 above) We might also include a native speaker place recognizing that it might have a null sumti value for a language such as Lojban: x1 is a language associated with native-speaking community x2 (This may open up a can of worms about null-values for sumti which is unrelated to the main point of this message. However, it seems to be plausible that null-values can be reflected in the semantics of a predicate if that null value is significant to the truth of the bridi. In other words, using this place structure, "la lojban. bangu noda" may be perfectly true, and even the elliptical "la lojban. bangu zo'e" may be true if we allow "noda" as a permitted value to be represented by "zo'e".) If you understood and bought that last parenthetical argument, how about x1 is a language of native speakers x2, used by x3 to communicate x4 which I think covers all bases if x2 is permitted to be noda. ("noda" ellipsis may turn out to be a necessary part of the language as used by people communicatively. Otherwise, given tensed sentences, you result in Latin being a "pu bangu" but not a "ca bangu" - it no longer is a language because there are no longer any native speakers. Now what kind of corner have I worked us into? And how does it affect ancient discussions about "klama" vs. "litru"?) Nora opines that there is no particular problem. Latin is a bangu even in the present tense: it is the language of "loi pu latmo prenu". Lojban can also be a bangu to those of us who believe it viable because it is the >potential< language of speakers - it is innately capable of being a native language. This may be a way around the "noda" problem. There seems to be three different types of relationships that lead to a "noda" value for a sumti. The first is a >specific< relationship which explicitly has no value in the sumti place that makes it true. My yesterday going to the store from San Francisco has "noda" for route and for means because I DIDN'T go to the store from San Francisco, and wasn't even IN San Francisco. It is still nonetheless relevant to "going" that there be a route and a means, and if I had done the hypothetical going, there would have been values. Such a claim is false unless I explicitly use noda, or (maybe) there is a darn good reason why a listener could accept "noda" as the elliptical value if I omitted it. The second is a situation like Lojban and bangu, where you have a relationship that is being evaluated at a point in time, but the nature of the relationship is that there is, or potentially is, a value that makes it true at some other time. The place is still appropriate because we've defined going to include a route and a means. The third is a situation where there is no value that could fit in the place because it makes no sense that there be such a value. "la lojban. zutse" = "Lojban sits" - since it is not in the nature of languages that they have a meaningful capability of sitting on anything, the x2 of zutse which is the thing "sat on" is "noda". Indeed the metalinguistic negator "na'i" could be used on either "la lojban." or "zutse" because on of the two words used is inappropriate in a way that transcends simply truth or falseness. The other situation is that addressed by the klama/litru discussion. "litru" which has a place for route, but none for origin or destination, does NOT claim that there is no origin nor destination. A Lojban bridi describes a particular relationship among sumti - we define the bridi in terms of what it relates and how they are related. "litru" defines a relation between a traveller, a route, and a means. Whether there may be other things like an origin or a destination are irrelevant to the claim, because those roles are not defined to be part of the relation. The argument over whether we need both "klama" and "litru" in the language is really one over whether it is useful to talk about travelling without inferring an origin and destination, and secondarily as to what the mapping is from English words to Lojban selbri. Now. Did I indeed talk myself into a corner, and then did I successfully work myself out of it? %^) And what should the place structure of bangu be? lojbab Oh, and are computer languages and amthematical languages bangu? If not, how about someone devising tanru/lujvo.