Date: Wed, 13 Jul 1994 05:52:29 -0400 From: Logical Language Group Message-Id: <199407130952.AA09636@access1.digex.net> To: BobMichael@aol.com Subject: Re: New to Lojban Cc: lojbab@access.digex.net, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Jul 13 05:53:13 1994 X-From-Space-Address: lojbab BO> 1) Though lojban is more a linguistic exercise than a tongue intended for BO> everyday speech, is there a "Conversational Lojban" primer. You know, BO> ordering a restaurant, hello, goodbye, "this suit is not clean!" I for BO> one would have an easier time grasping the language if it could be applied BO> to everyday situations. Might draw others into its study, too. Well, I wouldn't call it just a linguistic exercise - sounds too much like we don't intend that anyone ever actualy USE the thing. In order to be useful for linguistics research (at least for the linguists to accept it as such) it BY DEFINITION has to be used/useful for everyday speech. We attempted once to come up with a Lojban 'Berlitz phrase book', and I still have it around somewhere, partially complete. Basically, it didn;t get done, for ac ouple of reasons: 1) Many/most of the everyday situaations have never come up in regular speech. Thus we are inventing usages out of whole cloth. When there really is a restaurant where ordering in Lojban is practical, this type of thing will make more sense - the phrases will at least have some meaning then. (Actually, what will happen is that people will coin them as needed for fiction. I have a brief restaurant scen in one of the textbook lesson readings. But when writing specific fiction, you at least have some context that might help the coining of usages 'as if' you were doing it 'live'. Dealing with a list of phrase just isn't 'live' enough. 2) the everyday speech situations in natlangs are exactly those where there is a heavy amount of cultural load. Think about "How are you?" which is not really a question, but a greeting, and "You're welcome" which can be stretched to fit its denotation only with some difficulty. Because of our desire to eliminate unnecessary cultural artifacts in our as-yet English- dominated community, I don't want such usages to 'come down from on high', but to evolve within the international Lojban community. Anything I, or the rest of 'Lojban Central' comes up with is too prone to cultural bias. Still, we want to come up with this kind of thing, and no doubt there will eventually be such a phrasebook. It just is not much of a priority (even though there are many people like you who would like it. Ooops. I left off reason #3: Lojban hgas a philosophy these days of "let a thousand flowers bloom". To make a terse, culture-free language 'interesting', as well as 'real', 'natural', etc., we need to take advantage of all opportunity to come up with multiple ways to say the same thing, preferably each with its own contextual basis. For example, Lojban has exactly one way to greet someone:"coi", whereas most natural languages have several. We want that richness, but not at the expense of 'coining' it. There are a lot of ways to express a thought; let people find the one that suits them. This makes Lojban a little harder to 'study' - there are fewer 'right answers'. But it makes it more interesting to 'learn', or to 'explore', because you join the others of us who are truly 'exploring' - trying thinmgs out to see what works, what seems right. My efforts at studying foreign languages (mostly unsuccessful, but I've learned a lot about the process at least) tells me that what WORKS is to learn a language not by studying phrase books, but by diving in and trying to internalize thinking in the language by figuring out how to say things for yourself. Adults are used to studying subjects where all the answers are known and can/should be abale to be looked up in a book. But languages aren't like that - there will never be a list of all the things someone might say or want to say in any language. I think kids learn language easier because they don't externalize the communication process this way (How 'should' I say this? vs. How am I going to TRY to say this?) they just go ahead and say something, and amend it if necessaaary to make it sufficiently clear so as to communicate. BO> 2) Lojban seems to be a rather terse language (I like that!). Do you have BO> any idea how many syllables it takes to translate an English passage of BO> say 100 syllables into lojban? Far prefer lojban to Esperanto, which BO> seems to me very verbose and exhausting for even the simplest utterances. Actually, I don't think Lojban is particularly terse, for a couple of reasons (I got a couple of reasons for everything %^) 1. Almost all Lojban these days is translations, usually from English or from ideas originally expressed in English. Almost always, a translation will be longer than the original, regardless of the languages, because the source language will have some things that must be paraphrased in the target language. Only rarely in translating (and usually only with the best translators) does a given source language expression have an obvious and more terse equivalent in the target language. 2. English and most natlangs have lots of words with multiple meanings. Lojban tries for only one meaning per word. If you have the same number of concepts (or density of ideas in the semantics space), then Lojban will need more varieties of words to express the same range of meanings. But there is evidence that natlangs are at some optimal level of redundancy (if abbreviated too much, communication would falter and people would have to repeat and rephrase more, while if the language is too verbose, people will tend to find shorter ways to say it in order to save time.) But if you need more words in the lexicon, and have the same inventory of sounds, then the average word will have to be longer, or you will have to have more multi-word phrases, in order to cover that range of meanings. 3. Being logically explicit and unambiguous, is prone to require more words than being ambiguous. (Proof by assertion, but I hope this is intuitive.) Try "everybody loves somebody" vs. For every x, there is a y such that x loves y". 4. Lojban has lots of little structure words that glue sentences together. These make for more syllables in the average text (and more words if the structure words are written separately). Languages that have declensions tend to be more terse, since they include the grammar in the very words themselves. Languages that have conjugations of verbs often need no personal pronouns. Lojban needs the pronouns more often in order to be clear. Where Lojban might seem terse is where we have not acquired a cultural veneer of paraphrase and euphemism. In Lojban, people are "dead" (morsi) they disn't "pass away", etc. I excrete(vikmi), not "go to the bathroom". This may make the language seem more terse than the English equivalent, but the other areas f the language more than make up for it. English itself is a particularly terse language as syllable count goes. When you take an English song, with only a few syllables per line, and try to fit Lojban words to it, you have to put several words per beat. Iambic pentameter is flowery in English, but most Lojban needs that many syllables in order to martch a rhythm and convey a meaning. Oh, a couple more reasons here too. 5. Borrowings in Lojban are always longer thanthe natlang word, because we require a classifier to indicate something of the semantic space being covered thius adds 2 syllables to each such word. jargon-laden Lojban will be very verbose looking. (Try to come up with a metaphor for "modem" - it actually is not that hard, but if you don't borrow it, you are prone to trying to convey "modulator-demodulator" which in Lojban might be a dozen syllables. 6. Lojban speakers tend to WANT to be more precise and exact in what they say. There are cases where something is perfectly clear in a short form, but is elaborated to make sure that PRECISELY the meaning intended is understood. People have said that translating meaning-rich English (Nick Nicholas is reportedly working on Hamlet's Solilioquy) is particularly difficult into Lojban, because people aren't happy with vagueness. (Yet Lojban allows some vagueness that English does not, such as tenseless eexpression - but these areas of vagueness tend in English to require little recognizable non-terse qualities: the -ed ending for past tense; the -s ending for plural, etc. tend not to require additional syllables. An excellent question, and a long-winded answer. I'm posting this to the list since I am sure it is of general interest. lojbab