Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 20:52:45 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711090152.UAA17397@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: "Mark E. Shoulson" Sender: Lojban list From: "Mark E. Shoulson" Subject: Re: The design of Lojban X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: <199710211813.OAA04885@cs.columbia.edu> (message from Andrew Sieber on Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:15:56 -0400) Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 3155 X-From-Space-Date: Sat Nov 8 20:52:50 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU >Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 14:15:56 -0400 >From: Andrew Sieber > >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. I'll not answer most of these comments, mostly because I suspect better-qualified folks have beaten me to it. It seems a bit elitist and overconfident to me to say that Lojban is as unrestrictive as possible, or as "clearly expressive." The plan with Lojban was to create a language based on predicate logic, thus whose biases (if any) would also be based on predicate logic, a basis not found as explicitly or as well-defined in any natural language, and see how that affects things. So in its way, Lojban DOES introduce its own linguistic bias (I'm not sure it's possible to talk of a language that doesn't), just one which is well-understood and well controlled. >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. Check out the cmavo list. >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 remember reading articles answering this; I think they made it into the reference grammar. >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. Been suggested (by me, among others). Personally, I'm in favor of considering h and ' to be alloglyphs of the same character. I find ' hard to read in some settings, particularly handwriting, and h is otherwise unused and pretty much identical in sound in most people's heads. There's also the historical support of selma'o names being written "KOhA" etc. from the computer parser. I still sometimes do this. And Rosta took the call further, and at least for a while did away with ' entirely, except where there was the possibility of ambiguity (so he'd sign "coo mie .and."). That's more than I, myself, would want. I still hope for the acceptance of h as a valid alloglyph of '. ~mark