From jim@uazu.net Fri Aug 24 16:36:16 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: jim@uazu.net X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2); 24 Aug 2001 23:36:16 -0000 Received: (qmail 69334 invoked from network); 24 Aug 2001 23:36:12 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 24 Aug 2001 23:36:12 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO tele-post-20.mail.demon.net) (194.217.242.20) by mta3 with SMTP; 24 Aug 2001 23:36:09 -0000 Received: from aguazul.demon.co.uk ([158.152.135.59] helo=tiger) by tele-post-20.mail.demon.net with esmtp (Exim 2.12 #2) id 15aQUh-000ONl-0K for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Fri, 24 Aug 2001 23:36:07 +0000 Received: from jim by tiger with local (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 15aQUT-00014D-00 for ; Sat, 25 Aug 2001 00:35:53 +0100 Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 00:35:52 +0100 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: [lojban] Re-evaluation + an idea - Was: A parable Message-ID: <20010825003552.A4085@uazu.net> Mail-Followup-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: ; from nicholas@uci.edu on Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 01:30:38AM -0700 From: Jim Peters X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 10070 Nick Nicholas wrote: > (1) "I am thinking," said Confucius, "that I am wise." > "Are you wise about strategy? About philosophy? About love? About the ways > of the butterfly?" > ... Well, a parable is to reflect on yourself and learn something, right ? (Apart from the Lojban which I don't understand at all well yet.) Something about being or acting wise in some abstract sense but not doing anything useful. Maybe I should come as clean as I can. I threw the spanner in regarding the defined meanings of Lojban words being non-abstract, as a Sapir-Whorf thing. However, I would be in no position to help with defining new meanings because whilst I can find lots of more abstract ways to look at everything, I'm not confident that I could come up with a set that would work well together as a system. It's completely clear to me that the Western scientific world-view is incomplete, and is just one world-view amongst many [*1]. There are many other world-views I've worked with, or come across, or wandered through, or got a hint of, but I've always learnt just what I've needed to know to get whatever job I was doing done - I don't know any of them well enough to build a complete system of understanding. So I'm like a wanderer coming back with strange stories, lots of bits and bobs of experiences and a few skills, but not much in the way of the kind of systematic information that might be required to help build or improve a language. If the approach so far with Lojban has been to base everything on a physical-scientific world-view, then I'm in absolutely no position to argue with that. In any case, it does have the advantage that all Westerners will understand it, and science has been spreading pretty well to other places. Maybe this could be seen as the chosen "tone" of the language. Also, I've learnt about (and come to experience) many of these other world-views from books written in English. So even though the English language had often never met that world-view before in its whole history, it could still be used to explain it and convey a sense of it. So this means it should all work out fine, then, probably, and it appears I was just stirring things up for no reason ... - - - The other thing about this abstractness that reflects on me is that at a concrete physical-world level, I'm not terribly productive, although I'm working on it. So no use in counting on me actually doing anything useful. - - - The other thing, whilst I'm coming clean, is that I had this idea that might be useful, I'm not sure. I believe in it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything in the big world out there. It goes like this: When you learn your native tongue, you learn it by example, not through rules and grammar or whatever. Somehow you `know' the rules without knowing them on a conscious level. The correct way of saying things just `sounds right', and an incorrect way `sounds wrong'. Some subconscious part of you is taking care of grammar rules and word-meanings automatically. This sounds like a *Good Thing*, because I don't like thinking too much unnecessarily, and I'd be very happy to have some other part of my brain take care of all this complication for me. Really I'd like to think about what I'm saying, not about the grammar. So, how does this come about ? Well, the child just hears a lot of examples. Phrases that contain a mixture of known-words and unknown-words have the known bits somehow `lit up', and the other bits somehow `blurry'. The mind tries to guess what the other bits might mean ("glorking by context" - it came up just now). After hearing an unknown word enough times, the guessed meanings will have come together into some kind of a pattern, and that becomes the approximate meaning of the previously-unknown word, becoming more clear as more examples reinforce that. Now, how about this as an approach - we define the language purely through examples. It's already come up just now - someone was talking about "soi vo'a", and how having just that one example meant that many people only saw it one way. What I'm really thinking about is emulating the native learning experience in some kind of accelerated way. Let's say we use some kind of flash-card program to help people learn phrases - in both directions, so they learn to say a Lojban phrase given the English phrase, and the other way around. The phrases (or batches of phrases) are ordered to help them a bit, but not entirely - we still throw in phrases that introduce new cmavo, say, without really explaining what is going on. The mind will do all its pattern-matching stuff to help make learning these phrases easier - like starting to recognise words, and provisionally associate words with meanings, and so on. How many examples of a particular word or construction do you think would be required to `program' the automatic language parts of the brain correctly ? Obviously more than one to avoid the "soi vo'a" situation. It would also be good to put as much varied stuff into each example phrase as possible. Having ten near-identical examples to illustrate some point is not the way it happens naturally. I mean, that might be useful in a logical discussion of the grammar, but not in what I have in mind. I'm trying to sneak all the rules in via the back door, and the brain has to be kept interested with lots of real-life variety. If this method works (i.e. it is possible to learn the rules without consciously learning them), then it is also very easy to get right. The learner can only base their subconscious knowledge of the language on the examples that have been given, so if all the language `authority figures' can agree that all the phrases are `good Lojban', then we can't go wrong. If a learner has learnt this way, without consciously learning any grammar, then we have our first natural speaker, don't you think ? I don't know how big a task this might be - how many phrases are required to completely define all the words and constructions to the depth that you'd all like them to be defined. Maybe it's an awful lot, so maybe this isn't actually feasible in practice. Still, I think that shifting to the point of reference of having to define the language purely by example (for our example `natural' learner) may be a useful way of re-evaluating things sometimes. That's it - Jim - - - [*1: Justification: Working with healing, I know that there are many systems to help understand and resolve illness, and all of the ones I know do indeed work, in their own ways. Although there are some common themes that occur, in several cases one world-view will say completely the opposite of another. So you can't make a bigger better world-view that actually works by merging them. This doesn't make any sense, but this is my experience. You can either look at it from one frame of reference or the other, but not both at the same time. (That doesn't stop you using two treatments at the same time, just that you often can't understand both of them simultaneously). It's something like switching between polar and cartesian coordinates. Some world-views are good for one thing, some for another - looking at a problem from one world-view might show a quick any easy route to a solution (which indeed works), whereas another world-view might suggest a solution that would take ages. For the next problem it might be other way around. For example, crudely - Western medicine: chop it out, or take this drug, Chinese medicine: balance energy flow, or bring out bad energy, Dianetics: re-experience the past painful event causing the problem, Reiki: let healing energy flow and allow changes to happen, Recapitulation: pull my energy back to me + return other's energy to them, and so on ... ] -- Jim Peters (_)/=\~/_(_) Uazú (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) jim@ (_) /=\ ~/_ (_) www. uazu.net (_) ____ /=\ ____ ~/_ ____ (_) uazu.net