Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 00:47:16 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710230547.AAA10792@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: HACKER G N Sender: Lojban list From: HACKER G N Subject: Re: Dvorak (& Lojban) X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2143 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Oct 23 00:47:32 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU > On Thu, 23 Oct 1997, George Foot wrote: > > > > [obLojban-related:] > > > Bringing this back on topic again, is this yet another parallel between > > logical language learning and logical keyboard layout learning? I.e., is > > it true that Lojban is relatively simple to learn as a second language > > (given some degree of dedication), while if one learns Lojban as a first > > language, learning other languages is more difficult (than learning Lojban > > second)? The above is somewhat confusing; put bluntly, is learning A as a > > first language and then Lojban simpler/easier/quicker than learning Lojban > > as a first language then A? After a bit of thought on the matter, George, I've decided that this isn't really an appropriate analogy. The reason that Dvorak is easier to learn after qwerty than qwerty is to learn after Dvorak is that Dvorak is MORE INTUITIVE than qwerty, not necessarily more logical. The only way in which it is more logical than qwerty is that it is designed to make it easier to type the letters that are more common NATURALLY in English. By contrast, Lojban is decidedly UN-intuitive and UN-natural. Terminators aren't natural, a grammar based on predicate calculus is most decidedly unnatural, and there seems no rhyme or reason to which sumti places take an abstraction, and which take a concrete, as Mark Vines pointed out. If you were going to look for a keyboard that was the analagous equivalent of Lojban, I would say that it would be a keyboard with all of the keys in alphabetical order - I understand the original typewriter keyboards actually used this layout. Whereas, if you were looking for a linguistic analogue to a Dvorak keyboard, then probably something like Interlingua would be the go, which was designed so that all the most familiar words for a speaker of a European language were presented in Interlingua in their most universally recognisable forms. This is to say that Lojban is logical but A PRIORI, whereas Dvorak is logical but A POSTERIORI. Analagously, the original typewriter keyboards were also logical and a priori, and Interlingua is logical and a posteriori. Geoff