Re: [lojban] Re: lojban as an auxiliary language

[Jim Carter <jimc@math.ucla.edu>]

On Fri, 2 Sep 2005, Timothy Bovee/DayPoems wrote:
> On 9/2/05, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Does anyone have any thoughts about the propriety of using lojban in a
> > situation where there is no other common language between two parties?

> Whatever the difficulties in learning lojban, it has the advantage that 
> concepts are rigorously defined, allowing culture-neutral communication.

:-)  The more closely you look at the word list definitions, the more you 
realize that they were made to get the product working, not to be rigorous 
specifications of concepts.  Compare, for example, the amount of useful 
material in a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary, and even those 
are descriptions of "English as she is spoke", not an experiment in 
prescriptive logical language.  

My favorite example of the kind of concept skew you mentioned: my Chinese 
wife and I were buying a picture frame and she was talking in Chinese with 
the vendor.  She said, to my surprise, "we'll take the red one".  To my 
English-speaking eyes the frame was black -- although in truth it was 
lightness 0.10 saturation 0.05 hue [whatever the number is for red].  I 
asked her about it later and it turns out that English has a region of 
"black" around the black point, whereas Chinese runs "hong" (red) right 
down to zero lightness.

The Lojban dictionary does not specify colors in enough detail to be immune 
to this particular misunderstanding, and the focus of the project has been 
on the grammar and the structure words and the place structures, rarely on 
precisely defining the concepts that specific gismu are supposed to convey.

On the original question of using Lojban as an auxiliary language, it has a 
lot of advantages over natural languages (particularly English and Chinese, 
which are the hardest common languages in my opinion), but a big 
disadvantage is that there are few people who know it and little written 
material likely to be useful in the auxiliary language role, such as maps 
and city guides.  You need a critical mass, which Esperanto may have, but 
Lojban definitely doesn't.

James F. Carter          Voice 310 825 2897    FAX 310 206 6673
UCLA-Mathnet;  6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555
Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu  http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)