From a.rosta@ntlworld.com Mon Aug 13 18:15:48 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@ntlworld.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 14 Aug 2001 01:15:48 -0000 Received: (qmail 35810 invoked from network); 14 Aug 2001 01:15:46 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l10.egroups.com with QMQP; 14 Aug 2001 01:15:46 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta05-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.45) by mta1 with SMTP; 14 Aug 2001 01:15:46 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.255.40.56]) by mta05-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20010814011544.MSJA20588.mta05-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew> for ; Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:15:44 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Chomskyan universals and Lojban Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:14:03 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 In-Reply-To: From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9562 Tsali (Arnt Richard Johansen): > It has been suggested -- among others by the person, whose name escapes > me, who reviewed _the Complete Lojban Language_ in _Journal of > Linguistics_ -- that the Lojban prescription may run counter to the > so-called "linguistic universals". Linguistic universals, in case you > want to know, are the properties that the Chomskyan school of > linguistics believe to be common to all languages -- and, in fact, > hardwired into the design of the human brain. > > Are any of you familiar with these theories? Can you name any universal > that Lojban violates? Can Lojban be used as a test of whether > "Mentalese" exists? If the current theory of language acquisition holds > true, what would the difference be between Lojban as we speak it, and > Lojban as used by a person who has acquired it as a first language from > someone who speaks Lojban as we speak it? Speaking unauthoritatively, I don't think that the Chomskyan school is currently able to state universals that delimit the set of possible natural languages. However, language typologists have compiled statistical universals, and have a fair sense of what is usual/rare/unattested/inconceivable in natural languages. So I do think it is possible to take the fruits of a broader body of linguistic scholarship and say which bits of Lojban are relatively more and less natural. Off the top of my head, here's an inexhaustive list of what I think unnatural: * the syntactic structure assigned by the yacc grammar * terminators * pretty much everything to do with the morphology and phonotactics * the attitudinals' systematicity and compositionality * MEX * the complexity of Tense, and aspects of its semantics * semantically arbitrary place structures * SE * SI/SA/SU * go'e go'o nei no'a * LAU I don't think Lojban will test whether a putatative universal is genuine, because these universals pertain to natural language, and Lojban won't be a natural language until it is acquired as a native tongue. However, in areas of great unnaturalness and moderate to great complexity, the fluency gained by Lojban speakers will show, I believe, the extent to which 'general intelligence', or more specifically, the skill of handling complex patterns and algorithms in real time, can get people by. This will then give us an idea of how much of our language faculty is language-specific and how much is a product of more general cognitive abilities. --And.