From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Mon Jul 10 19:50:38 2006 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-list); Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G08KJ-0005ZT-Hx for lojban-list-real@lojban.org; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:19 -0700 Received: from py-out-1112.google.com ([64.233.166.180]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.62) (envelope-from ) id 1G08KI-0005ZK-AC for lojban-list@lojban.org; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:19 -0700 Received: by py-out-1112.google.com with SMTP id x31so1049762pye for ; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:17 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta; d=gmail.com; h=received:message-id:date:from:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=hK5w9/6S41/O3YlfT+rsTTjuhPh63wNriUmhkyWMVNFnEvcirEyvh6t6I4ZxW+iKLafVLQCmtlJLEqZgDM4qzyJdIB/KUOLqOSz0adSs13XG7XKsLfPfuSltsv7E9P/AjjWeCZoScvuS+rb2+1SC850jxrZaEkCYFOA0ajAxQzA= Received: by 10.35.21.1 with SMTP id y1mr5950356pyi; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:17 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.35.39.7 with HTTP; Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:50:16 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2006 20:50:17 -0600 From: "Maxim Katcharov" To: lojban-list@lojban.org Subject: [lojban] Re: Cultural Neutrality In-Reply-To: <20060710202233.40531.qmail@web81303.mail.mud.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by Ecartis Content-Disposition: inline References: <20060710202233.40531.qmail@web81303.mail.mud.yahoo.com> X-Spam-Score: -2.4 (--) X-archive-position: 12092 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-list-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: maxim.katcharov@gmail.com Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-list@lojban.org X-list: lojban-list On 7/10/06, John E Clifford wrote: > While it was at first a little hard to see what ZOI had to do with cultural neutrality, it > eventually emerged (sorta) that the fact that expression in any language (eventually, any medium) > could be inserted into Lojban with equal ease meant that no language/culture was favored. The > proposal in which this point was involved was to give Lojban as phonetic alphabet (auxiliary to > its everyday one) so that such insertions would be as accurate presentations of the original as > possible, rather than necessarily restricted to the phonemes of Lojban. In this way, for a > phonetically skilled speaker at least, every language would indeed be represented as > easily/accurately as any other. Nothing seems to have come of this proposal, since Lojban speakers > already can insert bits of any language (in a very broad sense)– rendered as accurately as the > speaker is able or inclined -- into their speech and the writer may insert foreign passages – > and indeed Lojban passages – in any symbol system he chooses. The suggestion came down then > only to setting a standard phonetic alphabet, which seemed outside the purposes – and competence > – of the Lojban community. > > What comes away from all that is the notion that cultural neutrality is about not giving > preference to one language/culture over another. Indeed, JCB once (on one of the rare occasions > when cultural neutrality got some discussion) held that Loglan's neutrality consisted in (or did > so mainly) the fact that there were no obligatory sentence modifications but all the various > possibilities were available. Thus, any pattern of modifications was equally possible and easy in > Loglan (and, presumably also in Lojban, which, if anything, has a broader set of possibilities). > > But "cultural neutrality" *sounds* like a lot more than being able to locate events temporally > by any known (and many unheard of) systems. The question, What more is involved?, seems not to > have been discussed much and is a difficult one – the more so if we want it to be the case that > Lojban has it. We have already noted the ability to find a place for expressions in any other > language – and ability all languages have. What comes after that? > > Thinking of culture in linguistic terms -- the way the language works – we can come up with a > number of things distinctive of various languages, word order, for example. Lojban is SVO at > heart, but can be SOV at no cost. VSO strictly costs a word, though this is often omitted. OSV > costs two words, as do OVS and VOS. One could say that the cost is proportionate to the > commonality of the order type (though that ground for exceptions is already very culturally > connected in some other sense) or that a word or two (and they are very short) is insignificant. > One could multiply such examples indefinitely: cases, articles, grouping, and so on. One could > notice how the vocabulary is drawn from all the major languages (ah, but not from all languages!). > One could think of prosodic factors (but Lojban is not very flexible here, certainly not up to > tight forms like heroic couplets). > > But none of these seems to be much like what we think of when we hear "culture." (Well, the > stuff about poetry sounds a bell.) From Anthro 1 we remember that culture is the totality of > institutions, mores, interactions, lore, and so on of a society. That sounds more like it, but > now it is a little hard to see what language has to do with it. Well, there is vocabulary: the > language of a culture has words for the things the culture finds essential, generally the more > essential the easier. (But Anthro 1 also teaches that the inference from vocabulary to culture > or conversely is very unreliable.) So, maybe one feature of cultural neutrality is that Lojban can > have the words for the essential of any culture with about equal ease. But, of course, the > easiest words in Lojban are the gismu, a restricted set and one that indicates (to make the > dangerous inference) a certain culture, which thus is preferred. Beyond that culture, since the > gismu are used to expand the vocabulary, it would seem that a culture's essentials would be the > more easily named the closer that culture was to Lojban's. > > So maybe it is not the things in a culture that are important but the social mechanisms of the > culture. Lojban has devices for dealing with the verbal aspects of such interactions: honorifics, > polite and rude ways to begin, end and interrupt a conversation, to greet and part, and so on, > ways to express emotions of almost any recognizable sort (including some blanks to be filled in as > needed). But still, people tend to think that vocabulary, even of this sort is a relatively minor > part of a language's involvement in a culture (the general contempt for the Eskimo snow word > joke). > > When people who really get involved in the issue think about the relation between language and > culture and what it means to say that a language favors one culture (or conversely), they > generally mean something about the epistemology or metaphysics of the culture (using those terms > as amorphously as they are in Lojban lore). It is said that people who have languages different > in the relevant respects see the world differently, divide it differently, select different > factors as significant (indeed, as present at all), have different expectations and explanations > for "the same" event. And so on. In the classic formulations (well, that is a little > overstated) of this study (von Humboldt, Sapir, Whorf), the relevant features of a language is its > fundamental grammatical categories: Are its basic units (roughly) verbs, nouns, adjectives, or > some mixture or coalescing of these – or something else altogether. Cultural neutrality in this > case would seem to mean something like: all of the possible categories are equally present and can > be combined in any pattern. > > At first glance it might seem that Lojban comes through as neutral here, since its basic words, > the gismu, are indistinguishably nouns, adjectives and verbs. But when the tests are applied, > Lojban turns out to be the most despised (Hey, I didn't say this was objective science) of > Language types, Standard Average European – and, indeed, the most SAE language ever. The SAE > pattern is noun phrases that stand for individual, isolated things, either individually or in > temporary cooperation, which receive properties and participate in activities. Most natural SAE > languages have some exceptional cases, mass nouns, for example, which refer to amorphous > substances, which to be sure, are usually chopped up into chunks that behave as individuals. > Lojban has no mass nouns, even the words for water and air are count. And a sentence is some of > these countable things receiving a property or participating in an event. Mass-noun-like talk is > possible in Lojban but only as cooperative by little pieces of things (i.e, the mass is built up > of individuals, rather than the individuals being cut from the mass). Other grammatical > (metaphysical) patterns are even harder to reproduce: all verb languages, all adjective languages, > even all noun ones. > > So, if we are to hold that Lojban is culturally neutral, we need to come up with a new meaning for > the term. And in any case, if we are going to say it, we need to explain what it means. > > Cultural neutrality in Lojban comes down to creating a language that is easy for anyone of any culture or language to use. A large component of this is not using a single language as the base, because odds are, that language will be harder for one segment of the audience to learn, and easy for another. Favoring Lojban over other languages is acceptable. Lojban's phoneme-set is supposedly simple for one of any culture/language to learn, and offers variant pronounciations. 90% (arbitrary figure) of people should have no problems pronouncing Lojban. That all their phonemes are not included is no big deal. Neutrality isn't about including every language, giving every language a part to play (as if people will be sore that their language isn't included), it's about making Lojban easy for everyone to speak. To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to lojban-list-request@lojban.org with the subject unsubscribe, or go to http://www.lojban.org/lsg2/, or if you're really stuck, send mail to secretary@lojban.org for help.