Message-ID: <344CEDAD.112F@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:00:13 -0400 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: Dvorak (& Lojban) References: <199710211702.MAA23067@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Status: RO Content-Length: 11940 Edward Cherlin wrote: > One has the same problems with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, kana, etc. > keyboards. I got a Russian typewriter in college, and learned to touch type > without disturbing my English typing skills. I don't think that's a case in point. It's one thing to get a keyboard mapping for a different script into one's fingers, such that \greek{t} triggers a different finger from \cyrillic{t} or \latin{t}. It's quite another thing to have 2 or 3 layouts for the *same* Latin letters in the fingers, such that each is associated only with its own, and you never type QWERTY "z" when in Dvorak mode, or Dvorak "e" when in QWERTY mode. Non-Dvorak Latin keyboards only differ in small ways (typical cases are QWERTY vs. AZERTY and different placement of some punctuation marks). -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Oct 21 14:14:15 1997 for ; 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 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 From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Oct 21 14:37:09 1997 for ; Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:37:08 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710211937.OAA27614@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: absieber@eos.ncsu.edu Sender: Lojban list From: Andrew Sieber Subject: Hams X-To: Lojban list To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 118 Does anybody on this list happen to have an amateur radio license? Just curious. --Andrew absieber@eos.ncsu.edu From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Oct 21 15:20:20 1997 for ; Tue, 21 Oct 1997 15:20:19 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710212020.PAA29073@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Ilya Ketris Sender: Lojban list From: Ilya Ketris Subject: Re: Dvorak (& Lojban) X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 875 On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, John Cowan wrote: > Edward Cherlin wrote: > > > One has the same problems with Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, kana, etc. > > keyboards. I got a Russian typewriter in college, and learned to touch type > > without disturbing my English typing skills. > > I don't think that's a case in point. It's one thing to get a > keyboard mapping for a different script into one's fingers, such > that \greek{t} triggers a different finger from \cyrillic{t} or > \latin{t}. It's quite another thing to have 2 or 3 layouts > for the *same* Latin letters in the fingers, such that each Why is it another thing? I touch-type in cyrillic, and cyrillic A, O, T, E, K etc. are just the same as their latin counetrparts (they look same, they sound similar) and still there is no confusion between two different modes. -- From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Oct 21 15:40:34 1997 for ; Tue, 21 Oct 1997 15:40:31 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710212040.PAA29921@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Karl Andrews Sender: Lojban list From: Karl Andrews Organization: Intel Corporation Subject: APL & Lojban X-To: Lojban list To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 1586 Andrew Sieber's response to Edward Cherlin's message (which I have yet to receive - ah, the vagaries of Email) seems to indicate both are familiar with APL. I am also semi-fluent in APL, and note that exposure to it causes one to look at problems in an entirely different way. (Would that be support for Sapir-Whorf?) Ordinary computer languages seem like pidgin in comparison, which I suppose they are. I originally became interested in Loglan and then Lojban as a means for sharpening my thinking in general, somewhat in the same manner that APL did for my math-oriented thinking. What jumped out at me was here are two other Lojban people who were familiar with APL. When I was active in the Seattle APL group, back in 1985 or so, there were two other people in that group who were familiar with Loglan. One was a professor of anthropology who was contributing familial relationship terms to the Loglan effort. It just seems statistically unlikely that such a small set of people as those familiar with APL and those familiar with Loglan/Lojban would have such a proportionately large intersection. Is there something else going on here, two aspects of a strange attractor, something in the nature of 'birds of a feather'? Another observation is that the Lojban Home Page is hosted from Finland. Finland was known around the world in the mid-80s as a hotbed of APL activity. Interesting coincidence? Veijo, are you familiar with APL? - Karl -- The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote. - Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5 From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Tue Oct 21 16:41:58 1997 for ; Tue, 21 Oct 1997 16:41:56 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710212141.QAA02876@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral Subject: Re: The design of Lojban X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2685 Andrew Sieber wrote: > 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. Well, perhaps. There are some things that are hard to say unless you understand predicate logic to some degree, and some places where Lojban can't be vague where other langs can. > 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? Yes. However, there is no single word that is ambiguous between the two (Latin didn't have one either, AFAIK). > 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? Lojban has four levels: mere association ("my friend"), specific relationship ("my seat on the bus"), extrinsic possession ("my toothbrush"), intrinsic possession ("my arm"). > 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? The latter. > [H]ow 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.) Using the alternate-base-separator "pi'e" (see the same chapter) we can express any base whatever, as well as compound bases like pounds and ounces. > Also, are there > any _symbols_ beyond 0, 1, 2 ,3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 ? No. Lojban doesn't define new symbols. > [W]hy 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. Whatever you want to do privately is fine with us. The canonical Lojban orthography uses the apostrophe. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban