X-Digest-Num: 261
Message-ID: <44114.261.1411.959273825@eGroups.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 1999 01:53:36 +0200
From: "Adam Raizen" <araizen@newmail.net>
Subject: Re: This list is not as I expected
X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1411
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Paul Dufresne wrote:

> But then, at least it should be very usable to do personal thoughts in
> your mind. But somehow I have the feeling few if any does that. The
> fact that I only see translation of text, rather than people posting
> their own ideas on a subject, without translation, make me think that
> they don't see Lojban simply like a tool to communicate. Of course
> translation of text is fine for people like me that would not
> understand anything without translation. But sure not having the
> translation would force me to try to decode the meaning, which would
> be good from a pedagogical point of view (well maybe not because
> I would give up very fast).
>  
> Of course I was expecting to see people
> speak of Lojban itself on this mailing-list, but I was also expecting
> people speak of just about anything, by using the Lojban language.
> Something like... like the new 'coppermine' processors that will be
> announce october 25.
> 

At present, the problem with gaining fluency in Lojban is that you 
can't copy anyone. Most people who become fluent in a second 
language have been around fluent speech extensively, but in Lojban 
this has to be created without the benefit of fluent speech to 
compare it to. The problem is compounded by Lojban's extreme 
unnaturalness (actually non-Englishness). If a bunch of North-
Americans and Europeans in a hypothetical China-less world got 
together and invented Chinese, and then wrote a grammar and 
word-lists and tried to learn the language, I suspect that many of 
them would think that it has many 'unnatural' features and isn't 
conducive to normal human thought. However, if enough of them 
kept at their project, they would eventually find that Chinese is as 
natural as English, even though it didn't seem so at first. (I think 
that Robin Turner said on auxlang a bit ago that there was a 
French linguist who said that the greatest thing about French is 
that the order of words is exactly the same as the order in which 
one thinks.) There is such an astonishing diversity in language that 
I would guess that very few (if any) features of Lojban are 
necessarily 'unnatural' in some 'hard-wired' way, but it's inevitable 
that we'd find it hard to express our thoughts in it in the beginning.

Personally, I say many phrases to myself in Lojban, just as I do 
with any language I'm studying, and I suspect that others do too. I 
haven't found any greater difficulty than with any other language. 
Sometimes I don't know a word or a grammatical construct, but 
that happens when I try to think in any natural language I'm not 
fluent in.

Also, I think that sometimes it's not quite natural for people to just 
start talking about a random topic in a mailing list not devoted to it, 
in English or Lojban. Maybe we all should try to make more of an 
effort to post thoughts which might start a discussion in Lojban and 
to reply to posts like that.

co'o mi'e adam