Re: [lojban-beginners] Getting in to the Lojban mindset

[Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 3:37 AM, mashers <mail@mashley.net> wrote:
> coi ro do

fi'i

> So, does anyone have any suggestions for how I can begin to
> reprogramme my brain? I'm aware that after 27 years of exposure to
> English, my thought patterns are based on English and it will take
> time to start understanding and formulating concepts in a different
> way. I just have no idea how to begin to do this!

Give it time.  That's the main thing that's going to help, really.
Sleep on it a bunch of times.  Don't expect it to make sense all at
once.

But I guess I'll try to give you some specific advice.  Focus on
understanding the basics.  If you can deeply understand the shape of a
simple bridi, then you understand most of the language.  Everything in
Lojban is made out of that shape.  We take a zillion different looking
things that are all fundamentally simple bridi, and cram them together
into one complex bridi.

For instance descriptions with an article, like "lo" or "le", are
really whole bridi that are just grabbed by their x1.  The rest of the
places are still there, hidden (and can be revealed by be/bei/be'o).
For instance every time you say "lo klama", the goer, there's a hidden
bridi wrapped up there, where "klama" is the selbri.  The x1 (the
goer) is connected to the bridi the sumti "lo klama" is in, but the
rest of the sumti of "klama" are still there, dangling invisibly--
there's a destination and origin and route and vehicle that are all
silently implied.

Other seemingly complex grammatical features are also just ways of
connecting simple bridi together.  You can attach a noi/poi/voi to a
sumti to add another description of it.  It's described as being in
the "ke'a" place (often ke'a is just implied, it's usually secretly in
the first unfilled place of the embedded bridi).  So one sumti is
described two ways, by the place it has in the bridi it's subordinate
to, and also as taking the "ke'a" place in the noi/poi/voi bridi.

I feel like my descriptions of how it works are making it sound
complex.  It does SOUND complex.  But it's not, not really.  Well it
is, and it isn't.  There's only one shape that does everything.  In a
way that's tremendously simple.  Once you understand how the bridi
shape does everything, acts like "verbs" and "nouns" and "adjectives"
and "descriptions" and everything, it's a very simple and elegant way
to do things.

A lot of things in Lojban are so simple they're difficult to explain.
Once you've explained it, it seems like you haven't said anything.
All you've said is that yet another construct in the language is
shaped like a bridi, because they all are, and where it plugs in to
another bridi and how they're related semantically.

A lot of the things in Lojban are specific kinds of vagueness.  Lojban
is masterful at vagueness.  It's also OK at specificity and exactness.
 But vagueness is where it really shines.  That might be
counterintuitive, it might seem like it doesn't fit with our mission.
But actually as you come to understand it, you realize that that's
exactly how we accomplish what we set out to accomplish.  A language
where you express everything in the universe exactly all the time
isn't possible.  The nature of language is to compress real,
complicated situations into tremendously simple, low-bandwidth
descriptions.  The only way that Lojban can have the kind of precision
and directness that we want is by quarantining the imprecision and
indirection that are necessary to communicate efficiently.

So we have a lot of places where we have very specific, precise
vagueness.  For instance take tanru.  Every tanru has two parts, the
se tanru or seltanru or seltau (the first part) and the te tanru or
tertanru or tertau (the second part).  The rule is simple: The tertau
determines the structure of the bridi (and a tanru is always the heart
of a bridi, either a main bridi or a subordinate bridi or a hidden
bridi in a description).  The tertau is where you must be accurate,
where the precision and exactness of Lojban are in play.  The seltau
on the other hand is just related to the tertau.... somehow.  It's
utterly vague.  It's even vague how vague it is.  It could be so
closely related to the tertau that for instance it's identical to the
x1, as in a "xunre plise" (red apple) that's both red and an apple.
It could be so distantly related to the tertau that it's related by
vaguely reminding you of something that looks like someone who talked
to the tertau's brother last Wednesday.  All of the exactness is
confined to the tertau.  All of the vagueness is confined to the
seltau.

Everything in Lojban is made of these ingredients: Simple bridi,
aggregated together into complicated shapes.  Some of the joints are
perfectly precise: A sumti marked with noi/poi is definitely in the
"ke'a" role, exactly as if it had appeared in that as a main bridi.
Some of the joints are perfectly vague: A seltau has some sort of
relationship with its tertau.

> Just to give a bit of background, I am a native English speaker. I
> am a trained and practicing Speech and Language Therapist (so
> linguistics and cognition are my speciality). I am dyslexic,
> dyspraxic and somewhere on the high functioning end of the
> autistic spectrum, but fortunately that does not inhibit my passion
> for linguistics to any significant degree :-)

Oh hello again!  I recognize that self-description, we talked on IRC a
few days ago. :)

mi'e .telselkik. mu'o

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