Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 16:01:02 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802202101.QAA11245@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: zo djuno ce zo jetyju'o X-To: a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: 7d9a336877306d59ee53df4ea5ceb6e3 X-Mozilla-Status: 8011 X-From-Space-Date: Fri Feb 20 17:00:41 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - >> 'djuno' means what the baseline says it does, i.e. what lojbab intended. > >This is surely the crux. Are we really going to have to interrogate >Lojbab at inordinate length about the meaning of every gismu. I hope not %^) >And >note that even the gismu that seem straightforward, e.g. djuno, can >turn out not to be. I cannot imagine any gismu LESS straightforward than djuno, given that it has messed up more discussions of the nature of Lojban, and led to more changes in the grammar than any other single construct or concept in the language. Given that philsophers have argued for centuries about what it means to "know" soemthing (or the equivalent concept in other languages) it seems that it is especially hard to pin down, even without the need to invoke multiple epistemologies and multiple metaphsyics's. I doubt that anyone would have to interrogate Lojbab about the meaning of mlatu %^) >> Why shackle ourselves with English semantics? We should be striving to leav >> them behind. If there is no need to define 'djuno' as English 'know', why >> it? > >This is the mabla anti-malglico attitude rife in Lojban. Just because >English does things one way doesn't mean Lojban has to do them >differently. The anti malglico attitude stems from the recognition that so much of Lojban's design was done by English speakers, and if we can ENVISION an alternative to English's way of expressing things, we assume that any tendency to choose the English-like way is reflecting our bias. We are afraid that failure to avoid such boas will lead to Lojban being merely a form of ecncoded English which will have little use that English does not already have. It would certainly reduce the potential for a Sapir/Whorf test (whereas always avoiding the English formulation would not, since the bias that results from any such decision is fairly random with regard to other languages) Furthermore, ther eis additional bias in that many people who are English speakers are drawn to Lojban because of the perceived illogicallity of English. Therefore they presume that going outside of English norms allows them to evaluate the logicality of their expression in itself, without the tendency to be drawn towards or away from a particular persepctive by its resemblance to a particular English formulation. Nora and I run across similar problems in ourt studies of Russian. The Russian word for "find" looks like a preposition-prefixed "upon-come" i.e. "to come upon". Clearly to come/go upon something does not necessarily mean to "find" it, but it has somehow become embedded in both lexicons (and perhaps is generally found in I-E languages, I don't know). We groan when we find these, and are troubled because too many such likenesses might lead us to try to express other things in Russian using what we perceive to be English idiomatics, and we are pretty sure this would be wrong (and not understood). With Lojban there are no native speakers to offend by such errors, and the majority of Lojban students are native English speakers who might not detect such idiomatic Englsih usage-translations, which would then infect and perhaps become idiomatic in Lojban without conscious analysis. It is useful that the two most prolific Lojban writers these days are Jorge and Goran who are not native English speakers and can be expected to hold our feet to the fire on malglico usages. But even they are fluent in English andare native speakers of other I-E languages. The real test of Lojban semantics will be when we try to communicate with non-English speaking native CHinese or Georgians or Thais using only Lojban. >We just have two competing definitions of {djuno}. One, which is >different from but akin to English "know", and which has been clearly >--More-- >articulated, and the other which Lojbab has been striving to >articulate with varying degrees of success. > >How do we choose between them? - e.g. if we are going to use {djuno}, >which meaning will we intend it to have? Do we just ask Lojbab to >pronounce on the matter, and do our best to understand what his >pronouncements mean, and just swallow and accept it if they turn out >to be incoherent, or do we actually deliberate the issue, looking >at the intrinsic sensicality of the candidate meanings, and their >relationship to the meanings of other Lojban vocables? Well, having delinerated on the issue, we can just leave it undecided, with the discussion on the record and clear in everyone's minds, and maybe add in the lujvo required to distinguish the other if one is chosen (true-knolwedge and false-knowledge, if my version is chosen; no idea if otherwise). Actual Lojban usage will then tend to conform toone or the other based on our perceptions of the merits of the cases. I think that my version is a superset of the other version, a more general form, and we have generally preferred to make gismu the most general yet sill meaningful forms possible. If Lojbab's pronouncements are incoherent, then people will use the language in ways that they variously perceive lojbab's pronouncements. When there is miscommunication, meaning will be negotiated to form a new sense of the word that will override Lojbab's pronouncements, since usage beats Lojbab in any dispute. But unless miscommunication occurs and is recognized, such resolution by usage is rather difficult. It will take a LOT of usage, not usage intermediated by English, before most fundamental disputes of the sort we are having dealing with generality of a gismu are going to be resolved. I would not expect that intelligent analysis of Lojban semantics as it pertains to usage can be done without at least 5 years of solid usage history. Unless usage rates pick up, I am sure it will take longer. We need more than Goran and Jorge writing in Lojban %^) Arguing semantics in English may resolve some issues to make people more confident int heir Lojban that they know what they are saying, but I think that developing fluency in Lojban usage will need to take precedence over developing semantic consistency. (And the fluency itself will lead to som sort of semantic consistency simply because we aren't going to reanalyze our use of djuno every time we use it). >It's hard to cite without there being a reasonably comprehensive >corpus. There has, though, been enough usage for one to get a sense >of how people use certain words and grammatical features. There is enoughg to get a sense as to how Jorge and Goran use some words and features. When we have 500 Jorges and Gorans and they all use the language the same way, then I will agree that we can know how "people" usae the words and features. Not that Goran and Jorge are not persons, but the use of the mass term suggest that we are dealing with a large enough mass that individual idiosyncrasies are not to be suspected when we observe a pattern. lojbab