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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.