Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:14:13 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710211914.OAA26811@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: absieber@eos.ncsu.edu Sender: Lojban list From: Andrew Sieber Subject: The design of Lojban X-To: Lojban list To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 3222 Lines: 54 Since Lojban is based on Loglan which was designed as a mechanism for testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which claims, basically, that people are limited in thought by the language in which they think, it's natural to assume that Lojban is as clearly expressive as possible, so as to remove restrictions imposed by most natural languages and see what happens when people begin to _think_ in Lojban. However, an equally valid way of testing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would be to put some odd, obscure restrictions in the language and see what effect they have on people's thought processes. I have been under the assumption (and have assumed that everybody else was also under the assumption) that Lojban tests the hypothesis only by lowering existing thought barriers in natural languages, not by raising new barriers, and so far I haven't seen any reason to change that assumption. However, I'm throwing this out as food for thought, and am curious if anybody thinks/knows that my assumption is false. Also, some specifics of Lojban: In English, "or" can mean either inclusive-or (and/or) or exclusive-or (either-or). Is there an unambiguous separation of the two interpretations in Lojban? In English, relationships are represented by (or are at least ambiguous with) ownership. "My sister's husband" implies that my sister owns her husband, and also that I own my sister. In Lojban is there a way to make references to relationship without implying ownership? I assume that Lojban has gender-neutral "pronouns." Does it also have gender-specific ones, or must gender be specified only by using a gender-neutral one and then using a separate, explicit modifier to specify gender? I found this paragragh in the electronic version of the reference grammar, chapter 18: "Lojban has digits for representing bases up to 16, because 16 is a base often used in computer applications. In English, it is customary to use the letters A-F as the base 16 digits equivalent to the numbers ten through fifteen. In Lojban, this ambiguity is avoided." That's fine and good for me, since I naturally think in decimal and also use hexadecimal fairly often, and Lojban allows for both of these. However, how are we ever to convince the Eskimos of Greenland to learn Lojban? They use base 20. (We can ignore the Babylonians, who used base 60, because they're all dead. No hard feelings.) Also, are there any _symbols_ beyond 0, 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 ? On another topic: there has been some discussion lately about using Dvorak keyboards with the ' and h keys swapped. I've got a simpler solution, albeit one that will probably make some people on this list mad, annoyed, or both, but I'll throw the idea out for consideration anyway: why not simply use the symbol h as being synonymous with the symbol ' and thus type comfortably using an unmodified Dvorak keyboard? For people who want to publish texts which they have created in this manner, all they have to do is use the find/replace feature of their text editors to change all occurences of h to ' and then their mischievous alphabet-molesting habits will never be noticed. --Andrew absieber@eos.ncsu.edu