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Re: [lojban] Re: Example of Cultural Neutrality
Nathaniel Krause wrote:
*/Yanis Batura <ybatura@mail.ru>/* wrote:
Can you read this?
la'o py. ãƒˆãƒ¨ã‚¿è‡ªå‹•è»Šæ ªå¼?会社 .py. goi ko'a cu ponjo
karcypra bo kagni
Assuming that I cannot, in fact, pronounce the Japanese correctly: if I
were called upon to read this sentence aloud, I would read it as "la'o
py. some Japanese characters that I don't recognise .py. goi ko'a cu
ponjo karcypra bo kagni". That is, as far as Lojban is concerned, "some
Japanese characters that I don't recognise" (or anything else, for that
matter) is an equally good spoken approximation of
ãƒˆãƒ¨ã‚¿è‡ªå‹•è»Šæ ªå¼?会社 as the actual Japanese words would be,
since Japanese script and pronunciation are not part of Lojban.
-Nat Krause
Precisely.
One of the advantages of having a phonemic alphabet in Lojban is that a
person can read the language aloud, or transcribe spoken Lojban, without
even having to understand exactly what is meant. Right?
Hijacking this thread for my own goals:
If Yanis reads his own text to another person who understands Japanese
(say, Hitomi), Yanis can convey information to her, in a manner that's
essentially external to the Lojban language. Isn't it a shame, though,
if Yanis' text read aloud by someone who *doesn't* know Japanese, to
Hitomi, that his meaning is totally lost? Shouldn't the role of
speaker, as much as possible, be made portable?
Instead of writing "la'o py. ãƒˆãƒ¨ã‚¿è‡ªå‹•è»Šæ ªå¼?会社 .py.", Yanis
has the *choice* of writing "la'o py. <phonetic symbols> .py." (assuming
he knows enough Japanese to know not only how it's written but how it's
pronounced). This has the advantage that someone who knows the phonetic
alphabet Yanis used, but doesn't know Japanese, can read the text aloud
in such a way that meaning (even if it is meaning that's not expressed
within Lojban) is not lost for Hitomi. (An Anguish Languish story, read
aloud, is frequently easier for a listener to understand than the
reader.) Similarly, you could write something using German, French, or
Korean; a phonetic alphabet (if used by all parties) essentially gives
the power to embed *any* spoken language in the world, into Lojban, with
only *one* extra skill, without losing meaning, even when transmitted
through someone who doesn't understand the meaning themselves. Gaining
all this power from one extra skill is impressive efficiency of expression.
On the other hand, it *is* still expressable by those who *don't* know
phonetics: it'll be read aloud as something like "la'o py. some phonetic
characters that I don't recognise .py.". This is no worse than Nat's
expression. (Someone who knows Japanese but not phonetics loses out in
this situation, but knowledge of Japanese is not so culture-neutral as
knowledge of phonetics, and culture-neutral knowledge is valued more
highly in Lojban.)
(As to the point of recommending *one* phonetic alphabet: there are n
phonetic alphabets out there now, which means even phoneticians who
subscribe to the above school of thought need n skills. A
recommendation (even if it's just the obvious one: IPA) would reduce
that to 1 skill.)
Drawback: Using phonetics like this ignores the phonemic map of each
language. The same word may be expressed using different phones. So
two ZOI phrases that look different, could in fact mean exactly the same
words. A phonetician who does not know the languages will not be able
to tell they are the same, but will be able to read both texts (or
transcribe both utterances) so someone who *does* know the language,
*will* know they're the same word. It's not as if either phonetician
will be *more* confused than they otherwise would be.
This approach makes the spoken expression, somehow more _fundamental_
than the written expression. There is a definitive, clear-cut way to
translate spoken expressions into symbols. There are ways to translate
symbols into spoken expressions too, but these are many many more
numerous, and even mutually incompatible. So the spoken expression is
more _suited_ to be the foundation.
Summary: The current system allows for non-Lojban written text to be
copied by someone who doesn't understand the content, still preserving
the content (so long as they are careful about the shape of the
symbols), and it allows for non-Lojban speech to be repeated by someone
who doesn't understand the content, still preserving the content (so
long as they are careful about the pronounciation). But there is
nothing (recommended) that allows the written world and the aural world
to be bridged in such a way. I think such a bridge is beneficial, as
the phonemic alphabet is beneficial in the way I describe in the first
sentence.
--
Good night, and have a rational tomorrow!
mi'e .xius.