[lojban-beginners] Re: learning lojban

["Karl Naylor" <karl.org@gmail.com>]

On 01/03/07, Alex Martini <alexjm@umich.edu> wrote:
> first big hurdle in learning Lojban. For a beginning book, the fact
> that every sentence is actually using first-order logic is pretty much irrelevant. I
> actually would have preferred to see Lojban introduced with the natural language notion
> of nouns and verbs first.

Does this not present the danger of Lojbanists having difficulty in
coming to think of sentences in terms of sumti and selbri instead of
nouns and verbs, and instead importing non-Lojbanic concepts into
their understanding of Lojban?  I'm still mentally slapping myself on
the wrist when I catch myself trying to build a Lojban utterance based
on its English expression (which is troublesome of course, because
it's hard to hold a concept in my head to be expressed in Lojban
without an English expression popping into existence).  I'm still
nothing like advanced enough in the language to be sure, but it seems
that a good way to encourage Sapir-Whorf effects to manifest would be
to attempt to forget everything you know about other languages and try
to understand Lojban on its own terms.

Intuitively, I would like to see this emphasised right at the
beginning of Lojban beginners' courses -- "don't try to look for nouns
and verbs in this language, nor for any other concepts from other
human languages you know.  Looking for predicate calculus concepts is
probably OK".

Thoughts?