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[lojban-beginners] Re: Lojban geography and cultures
On Apr 17, 2007, at 7:28 AM, Turniansky, Michael wrote:
[ li'o ]
Lack of cultural bias? No, that’s an almost-meaningless
catchphrase thrown around the lojban community (and inherited from
loglan). What it really means in terms of neutrality is that the
grammar allows you the flexibility to express things in any number
of grammatical ways, reflecting the grammar of a huge variety of
natural languages (and many more ways not reflective of any natural
language), and that the wordstock did not come from any single
language or language family, but is a blending of languages spoken
by billions of people, thereby obscuring any cultural bias in word
choice.
This is probably the best way I've heard to define "culturally
neutral", which is otherwise one of the more misunderstood claims
about Lojban. I think that it also makes more sense if you look at
other 'international languages' from the period around & before
Loglan was created. Esperanto (and it's descendent Ido) Interlingua
and Volapük, to name a few, all had very European grammatical ideas
of sentance structure and drew almost exclusively from European
languages for their vocabulary.
Lojban very clearly has a different-from-every-language notion of
grammer, and the vocabulary was drawn from English, Spanish, Russian,
Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic (if I don't misremember) so -- in
comparison to other very European languages -- it is quite a bit more
neutral.
The vocabulary itself, on the other hand, makes choices on what it
can say easily and what it can’t. (Why is there a native word
(gismu) for lions, tigers, and elephants, but none for zebras,
rhinos, or hippo (or antelope, but I suppose some would argue
“mirli” can be used for that)? Why for rat and mouse and rabbit,
but not squirrel or raccoon (or even “rodent” in general)? Why for
rose and tulip, but not for daisy or lily? Etc. etc.) Everything
comes down to choices made by the language creators, and as such,
represents a bias of some sort or other. So I don’t personally
speak of lojban as “culturally-neutral” except when it comes to the
grammar and word sources. Period.
That's probably the best policy.
mu'o mi'e .aleks.