X-Digest-Num: 50 Message-ID: <44114.50.188.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 13:43:27 +0000 (GMT) From: Lin Zhe Min Subject: Re: rights (fwd) X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 188 Content-Length: 1494 Lines: 39 #1 of our discussion Date: Mon, 01 Feb 1999 17:46:10 +0200 From: Robin Turner To: Lin Zhe Min Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: rights coi lin. Apologies for writing in English rather than Lojban, but it's been a hard day and my brain isn't working very well ... A while back the question of language "learnability" was being debated on the AUXLANG list, with many people saying that although Lojban was more systematic than most constructed languages, it was too hard to learn to be serioualy considered as an auxiliary language, while Interlingua, Occidental etc. could be understood easily by most Europeans. I countered by saying that while it was true that _Europeans_ would certainly find Interlingua a lot easier than Lojban, the reverse was probably true for non-Europeans. In particular I thought that Lojban would be easier for Chinese-speakers, partly because the grammar is a bit closer to Chinese, and partly because there's so much Chinese in the vocabulary (e.g. {hirma} has only the 'h' and 'r' of English 'horse', but all of Chinese 'ma'). In your experience, is this true? By the way, I studied Chinese for a year when I was at university - I found the grammar really easy but could never remember the vocabulary. All that stays in my mind now are a few sentences like "Women duo hen dao duanlian" and "Tongzhemen! Zhanxilai!" - our textbooks were written during the Cultural Revolution! co'o mi'e robin.