From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:51:51 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Wed, 26 May 1993 23:38:36 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 2723; Wed, 26 May 93 23:37:46 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3302; Wed, 26 May 93 23:39:01 EDT Date: Wed, 26 May 1993 23:37:18 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: John Hodges on "Why Lojban?" X-To: conlang@buphy.bu.edu, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: X-From-Space-Date: Wed May 26 19:37:18 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: John Hodges submitted the following essay, and asked that I post it to the net for comment. He is interested in comments from non-Lojbanists as well as Lojbanists, hence I am posting it to conlang as well. As will be obvious from the posting, John is among other things a student of philosophy/ethics, and is especially interested in philosophical issues of conlangs. lojbab Consider Klingon. Noticeable numbers of Star Trek fans are teaching themselves to speak Klingon. You commented, "They have certain marketing advantages." Certainly they do- publicity, media exposure, celebrity endorsement, support of a major publishing giant. Fans learn it to associate and identify with these great adventure stories on TV. (We should tell SF and fantasy writers that this other strange, simple, carefully-worked-out language is available, public domain.) We have to think about marketing ourselves. Consider also Esperanto. One (by no means the only) approach to ethics regards it as the practical question of how to maintain peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors. By this approach, the ultimate goal of ethics would be World Peace. (You expand your circle of neighbors until you are maintaining peaceful and cooperative relations with all the people there are.) This is the moral crusade that the Esperantists set out on over 100 years ago. Dr. Zamenhof saw his neighbors (in eastern Poland) divided into hostile groups largely along lines of language. He reasoned that a constructed language, culturally and politically neutral (i.e. not the property of any contending party), and easy to learn, would provide a way for people divided by language to meet each other halfway. The International Language movement, having begun with Volap k, switched en masse to Esperanto. Later came the Ido split, which divided this movement for World Peace into quarreling factions and thereby took a lot of wind out of their sails. Then came World War 2; The Nazis (of course) saw them as undesirables and killed many. Since WW2 there have been other problems... by sheer persistence the Esperantists have accumulated ~10,000 books translated or written in their language, have built a network of organizations spanning ~100 countries, and have taught ~2,000,000 people. On the one hand, this is only 0.04% of the world's population; on the other, it is far beyond the accomplishments of other constructed languages, which typically number their active membership in the dozens. I believe their persistence owes much to their moral idealism; it is not just a hobby to them. Soon Lojban will have printed, bound books to sell. How shall we sell them? What reasons shall we give, when people ask "Why Lojban?" What is our point? What useful function do we serve? What moral crusade do we offer, what hope for making the world better? I have a proposal for discussion. We can give five reasons. 1) The hope for beneficial Sapir-Whorf effects. 2) The potential for computer applications. 3) Future potential as an international common tongue. 4) A game, a personal mind-expander. 5) The Elephant. The original and still primary goal of Lojban is to serve as an experimental vehicle for scientific research into the interaction of language, thought, and culture. In particular, we hope to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which states that the structure of a language constrains the thinking of people using it. Lojban has a grammar built around predicate logic, and is designed to be exceedingly flexible in expression, to minimize constraints on thought. We hope that people who think in Lojban will think more logically and/or more flexibly than they do in a natural language. I have a personal fondness for this goal. The early pioneers of aviation had a dream: "Someday, people will fly." The Esperantists have a dream: "Someday, people will not be divided by language." I have a dream: "Someday, people will think logically." Even if there is no effect on thinking, Lojban can be used as a teaching vehicle for logic and language. Somebody (Perhaps me- any others?) would have to write teaching material with that orientation. Is this in any way a moral cause? Science is a method of inquiry, of seeking increased understanding. There are certain virtues necessary to the practice of scientific inquiry... beginning with the admission that we are not infallible and may not already know the complete truth. (Including the complete truth about ethics.) Honesty, willingness to learn from all sources, giving a fair hearing to original thinking and diverse views, willingness to admit error, care and attention to detail, being observant, subordinating your own theories and wishes to the evidence. The pursuit of understanding is certainly a moral goal, beneficial both to the individual and to society. The attitudes and virtues of science, when carried over to dealing with other people, create a non-authoritarian and democratic sort of society. (For more on this, see John Stuart Mill, ON LIBERTY, and Jacob Bronowski, SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES.) A second major goal influencing the design of Lojban was to make it "computer-friendly." The grammar, pronunciation, and word- forms of Lojban are unambiguous. Lojban words have no homonyms and no multiple unrelated meanings. Computers can transcribe, parse, analyse, and translate it far more easily than any other human language. There may be many computer applications of Lojban, for databases, AI work, etc., but my favorite dream here is the translator-box. Travelers could carry a box, into which they speak (or type) Lojban, and out of which comes an automatic translation that may be wordy and stilted but WILL say what they intended to say. Given such boxes, people would have a reason to learn Lojban even if no one in the country they are to visit speaks it. The usefulness of Lojban to travelers would not depend on the number of other speakers but on the number of plug-in languages available for the translator-box. Also, those studying another natural language could use the box as an interactive teacher, for any of the available plug-in languages. Machine translation seems to me the project most likely to give tangible results within a small number of years. It is a project that can be worked on by a small number of widely scattered people. It is a project that is academically respectable, suitable for theses and grants. It can be done by people who are not terribly fluent in anything but their native tongue. Intermediate results, software that gives bad but decipherable translations, can still be useful, as research and as teaching tools. People who are not AI programmers can still contribute to the development of translator boxes. By searching out "How would you say X", and adding to the vocabulary, you are adding to the translation algorithm/database between Lojban and your native tongue. You thereby contribute to the future fluency OF all Lojban speakers IN your native tongue. A third goal is future use as an international common tongue. The obvious first question is "What about Esperanto?" Do we wish to challenge the Esperantists for this particular niche? In my opinion, not just now. But, maybe later. Chapter 3 of David Richardson's Esperanto textbook begins "Early schemes for an international language were rather more the work of philosophers than linguists. These inventions seem to have been intended to promote logical thought as much as to facilitate universal communication." Descartes and Leibnitz, for two examples, worked on inventing such a language, but the state of the art in relevant fields was insufficient. Lojban is the modern- day incarnation of that dream. Esperanto, by contrast, was invented by a linguist (polyglot) for ordinary people to use in mundane life, and he focused on making it simple, functional, and easy to learn. If Esperanto is the peacemaker's language, and Lojban the philosopher's, they may coexist. But if they both aim at being a global common tongue, conflict seems inevitable. Relations between Lojbanists and Esperantists are a complex subject. I have great admiration and respect for the Esperanto movement, and I would like to see some accomodation, even alliance, made. To start with, I think for the time being anyone whose major interest is an international common tongue should learn Esperanto, either "in addition" or just plain "instead." We should also have an Esperanto translation of our teaching material. The field of "constructed languages intended to serve as an international common tongue" is a natural monopoly. You only need one; you only want one. Whatever the virtues or flaws of Esperanto, the relevant question for any alternate candidate is not "Is it better?" but "Is it ENOUGH better to justify abandoning all the work that the Esperantists have already done?" To answer "yes", an alternate language would need to have radical advantages. I think that well-functioning, cheap, portable translator-boxes would provide one. At present, it is far easier in most parts of the world to find a speaker of English or French than of Esperanto. To use Esperanto, not only YOU have to speak it, but those you are speaking TO must also. But given translator- boxes, you could make yourself understood in places where no one else spoke Lojban. That, and a few dozen words of the local tongue, would suffice for most travelers. If such boxes became common, local people who do business with travelers would be constantly hearing Lojban followed by translations in their own tongue; they might learn Lojban themselves that way, or study it just to eliminate the middlebox. The boxes would provide the entering wedge, to give everyone learning a second language a practical reason to choose the same one. Once started, the forces of "natural monopoly" would take over, and eventually the boxes would no longer be needed. Significant Sapir-Whorf improvements in thinking, if any occur, would also give a reason for preferring Lojban to Esperanto. So, AFTER we get tangible results in the areas of Sapir-Whorf or machine translation, we may have grounds for invading the Esperantist's turf. Even in that event, cooperation may be possible. There is much work being done on computer analysis and translation of Esperanto. Once experiment shows that good T-boxes are possible, rather than take either language as it stands, perhaps what has been learned can be used to make a new language, adding cmavo to Esperanto perhaps, to make a language both speakable and machine-friendly. "T-box E-o" might be a superset of existing E-o, with added logical operators, scope delimiters, and spoken punctuation. Even if not, if Lojban "as is" wholly displaces Esperanto, we would be offering an alternate route to the same goal. If the goal of fostering world peace by means of an international common tongue was achieved, I think Zamenhof would not much mind that the language was not his. A fourth reason is as a game, a personal mind expander. A speakable form of logic, extremely flexible in expression, offers a good chance of learning SOMETHING from every exercise in translation or composition. The effort of saying things in Lojban, "in the Lojbanic spirit", involves getting beyond familiar structures and idiom, stating what you mean clearly in a culture- transcending way. You see more deeply into logic, language, AND the subject of which you are speaking. There are also varieties of wordplay not found elsewhere, to compensate for some that are lost. Every completed composition contributes to the other goals of Lojban as well. Finally, the Elephant. The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887) It was six men of Indostan to learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant (though all of them were blind), That each by observation might satisfy his mind. The first approached the Elephant, and happening to fall Against his broad and sturdy side, at once began to bawl: "God bless me! but the Elephant is very like a wall!" The second, feeling of the tusk, cried "Ho! What have we here So very round and smooth and sharp? To me 'tis mighty clear This wonder of an Elephant is very like a spear!" The third approached the animal, and happening to take The squirming trunk within his hands, thus boldly up and spake: "I see," quoth he, "the Elephant is very like a snake!" The fourth reached out an eager hand, and felt about the knee. "What most this wondrous beast is like is mighty plain," quoth he; " 'Tis clear enough the Elephant is very like a tree!" The fifth who chanced to touch the ear, said: "E'en the blindest man Can tell what this resembles most; deny the fact who can, This marvel of an Elephant is very like a fan!" The sixth no sooner had begun about the beast to grope than, seizing on the swinging tail that fell within his scope, "I see,' quoth he, "the Elephant is very like a rope!" And so these men of Indostan disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right, and all were in the wrong! MORAL So oft in theologic wars, the disputants, I ween, rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, and prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen! To the question "Why Lojban?" we can answer, "There are many possible uses for Lojban, and different people will focus on different aspects. But all the uses interact. Beyond all the particular uses, there is a larger whole." There is an elephant beyond the six blind men. Yes, Lojban is fun. Yes, it offers potential for computer applications. Yes, it may help people to think more flexibly and/or logically. Yes, it offers hope as an international language. But these can be seen as parts of a grander whole. The discipline required to write for computer translation forces clear and non-culturebound expression. This is mind-expanding for the individual and enriching to the world. This is the human side of machine translation; computers may someday translate from Lojban to natural languages, but only what people have expressed in Lojban to start with. Writing prose, letters, diaries, and drama in Lojban, in the spirit of Lojban, is therefore writing them for the ages, for all people and cultures. The formal language, and the literature therein, is what we wish to share with the world. (For a cover illustration for the textbook, how about an elephant standing behind an open-eyed Englishman, Chinese, Hispanic, Russian, Hindu, and Arab? Perhaps with R2-D2 down in front.) (For a logo, a small stylized elephant.) a'o ro le prenu cu cilre la lojban .i co'omi'e John Hodges. === EOT