Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 17:26:26 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710242226.RAA10764@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Linguistics journals X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1276 Lines: 22 >Could Lojban be used, if not "studied" as such, by a linguist/logician as >a tool for discussing and illustrating some fine points of linguistic >logic? Not writing *in* lojban, just giving examples in Lojban. An >abstract discussion of how abstraction, quantification, and argument >raising (to pick three things out of the hat) would be less readable and >more prone to error than one that analyzed example sentences with {nu}, >{ci}, and {tu'a} in them. In other words, maybe Lojan could be useful in >the same way math notation or normal predicate calculus are useful. I have discussed with one linguist (Alexis Manaster-Ramer) about using Lojban as a tool for communicating semantic nuance in a way that English translation cannot in reporting examples from other languages. I also found that Lojban event contours made it easy to understand the Russian perfective system, which is purportedly one of the more difficult features for English speakers to understand. This suggests that Lojban may be useful in conveying the significance of grammatical strutures in one language in terms understandable in English or some other native language. For example, perhaps someone could show ergativity in Lojban more clearly than in English. lojbab