Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 15:37:05 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712022037.PAA00524@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: reply to And #2 X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Status: RO Content-Length: 3574 Lines: 72 > >Now I do concede that there could be a different project, where we come > >together and form some kind of community and agree to interact with one > >another in certain ways, e.g. practising free love, not raiding someone > >else's stash, not using metaphor, and so on, but the product of this > >project would be a community, not a language. There's nothing wrong > >with this project, but it is not the same thing as Lojban. > > Well, there are some such interactions at least implicitly assumed as > part of the language design. One for example is that Lojban speakers > will more-or-less-always speak grammatically, or at least that one may > interpret a grammatical Lojban sentence as expressing the proposition > literally represented by a sentence structured correctly according to > the defined syntax. I don't perceive any of this as implicit in the language design. > Thus "ta mlatu" is a claim relating the demonstrated referent and > cathood and does not represent the same proposition as "The moon is made > of green cheese" (at least not without marking that something > non-standard is going on semantically). If it did/could, then there > would no true capability to perform logical analysis on the language > use. I don't see the problem. What sort of logical analysis do you have in mind? > Lojban, or more specifically Lojban language use, thus implicitly embeds > some desire to have the logical aspects of the communication be > accountable. Using unmarked metaphor or irony denies that > accountability - it renders a key portion of the framework of the > language (which is more than merely its syntax) moot. It strikes me as strange that you say that irony denies the accountability of the logical aspects of the communication (- I disagree) yet you have also declared that you endorse and yourself intend to adopt a usage where logical aspects are used in a slapdash way where the difference between {all cats are not black} and {not all cats are black} is treated as unimportant. > We know that people don't always realize this ideal, but the ideal still > exists. The ideal of always-correct usage is not actually stated in the > Book, but the existence of some such ideal is strongly implied by the > existence of a YACC grammar for the language in the book. I will go as far as agreeing that there is a general presumption among ourselves that utterances should be syntactically well- formed. Beyond that, I detect little agreement. > >> But Lojban is also among other things designed to test the sapir-Whorf > >> Hypothesis. If it did nothing that "language has no place doing" in terms > >> of possible effect on human thought and culture, then it pretty much could > >> NOt have a SWH-related effect. > > > >Do you really mean that? I can't believe you do. If you did mean it, > >it would surely imply the abandonment of the original goal of Loglan. > > I don't see how. If you define Lojban language as being exclusive and > unrelated to culture then by definition you end up assuming NO SWH > effect. > > But I was specifically saying that Lojban has things built into it that > are explicitly NOT part of any known language nor any language's > interaction with culture. Those things were built in IN ORDER TO test > SWH. Some of them contradict all known cultures and languages. Yet > they are part of the language. I infer that you did not intend to say, as you originally did, that Lojban could have a SW effect only if it did something that falls outside the narrow definition (lg as gerna) of language. --And