From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:58:44 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI Received: (qmail 11362 invoked from network); 13 Dec 1996 00:48:44 -0000 Received: from segate.sunet.se (192.36.125.6) by xiron.pc.helsinki.fi with SMTP; 13 Dec 1996 00:48:44 -0000 Received: from listmail.sunet.se by SEGATE.SUNET.SE (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.3BF50D85@SEGATE.SUNET.SE>; Fri, 13 Dec 1996 1:48:43 +0100 Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 17:47:41 -0700 Reply-To: Chris A Bogart Sender: Lojban list From: Chris A Bogart Subject: Re: Lojban's imperfections? To: lojban%cuvmb.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu Cc: Chris Bogart In-Reply-To: <199612122248.PAA22936@indra.com> Content-Length: 4776 Lines: 102 Message-ID: On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Christian Richard wrote: > Hullo! Hi! Some of these questions I don't know about; others I'm not very interested in, so I'll let others answer... > 1. In Lojban, why is the first argument of a predicate put before that > predicate? All the arguments can be put before the predicate, or some of them, or all but the first. The first argument can't go after the predicate so that pred-arg-arg-arg can have a special meanining (observatives). The fact that lojban is often written with exactly one argument before the predicate is probably English bias, but it's not necessary. Feel free to put the predicate last if you want! > 3. There seems to be much talk about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how > Lojban can be a way to test it. Exactly how is it intended to be tested? > Has there been any tests and results yet? Or is this test of the > Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis simply talk and no real thing done yet? I think it's pretty much "simply talk" at this point -- it requires someone being pretty fluent, perhaps even having Lojban as a first language, and that isn't going to happen anytime soon. I don't know if there are any concrete plans for experiments along these lines -- I'm not sure how it could be tested. Personally, I consider it a subjective experiment -- I'll see if I think I think differently after I'm fluent. But that's certainly not a scientific test. > 5. Lojban seems to emphasise morphological and syntactic ambiguity, and > the language seems to try hard to be the less ambiguous possible. > However, Lojban allows the compounding of roots to form compound > words that by themselves could mean any number of things. Is this > intentional? Why is this allowed in a supposedly unambiguous language? Two reasons I can think of: - Perfect unambiguity is very difficult, perhaps impossible. Never mind compounding of roots -- the exact meanings of the roots them- selves is ambiguous. The best we can do is get rid of syntactic ambiguity, and reduce semantic ambiguity as much as we can - A real human language must provide for the sorts of things people want to say -- and people sometimes want to say ambiguous things. The compounding rules state fairly precisely what about them is ambiguous and what is not -- in a sense we're letting people decide *precisely* how ambiguous to be. > 6. To learn Lojban, I would have to master the order, number, and > semantics of arguments associated with each predicate. I have noticed > that this dependency on order is also very much like the usual order in > English. Are there again reasons why this order is not culturally neutral > and wasn't originally determined randomly instead of matching the natural > order the arguments would have in English? Or is this a direct import > from the predicate calculus? I think an attempt was made to place the arguments in order of importance -- but this task was performed by an English speaker. I think it was done well enough, but perhaps a native speaker of something very different from English would see the bias more strongly than I can. > 7. Is Lojban intended to be a language learnt and usable by humans? If > so, how can it have such strict velency rules that depend only on physical > order for identifying the role of each argument. Wouldn't this make > Lojban more of a computer language than a natural language? Your statement sounds reasonable, but what evidence do you have to support the idea that this method isn't learnable? This is the sort of thing where Lojban can be a useful experiment -- if people can't learn to do this, then we've learned something about how the brain processes language. Personally I think people will be able to learn this -- my only evidence being that it's easier for me now than I thought it would be when I started. But I'm far from fluent yet, so it's hard to say. > I would be interested in knowing how successful you were in having complex > conversations in Lojban during your annual Lojban-parties. > Is there anybody in the world fluent in Lojban, speaking fast and > naturally, just as an Anglophone speaks English? Some of us can get by in conversation; probably Nick is the closest thing to fluent that we have. The problem is we're too spread out geographically for a real speakers community to form. There have been some fairly protracted Lojban conversations, but once a year just doesn't cut it for gaining fluency. Another problem is that it just isn't practical to spend gobs of time learning Lojban right now, so it's hard to put the time into it. I've really slacked off since this spring when I got a full- time job. Anyone in Colorado want to get together once a week for birje joi nuncasnu? co'o mi'e kris